textfiles/etext/AUTHORS/EMERSON/emerson-conduct-228.txt

        THE CONDUCT OF LIFE
        by Ralph Waldo Emerson

 
        I
 
        FATE
 
        Delicate omens traced in air
        To the lone bard true witness bare;
        Birds with auguries on their wings
        Chanted undeceiving things
        Him to beckon, him to warn;
        Well might then the poet scorn
        To learn of scribe or courier
        Hints writ in vaster character;
        And on his mind, at dawn of day,
        Soft shadows of the evening lay.
        For the prevision is allied
        Unto the thing so signified;
        Or say, the foresight that awaits
        Is the same Genius that creates.
 
 
        _Fate_

        It chanced during one winter, a few years ago, that our cities
wsing the theory of the Age.  By an odd coincidence, four or five
noted men were each reading a discourse to the citizens of Boston or
New York, on the Spirit of the Times.  It so happened that the
subject had the same prominence in some remarkable pamphlets and
journals issued in London in the same season.  To me, however, the
question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of
the conduct of life.  How shall I live?  We are incompetent to solve
the times.  Our geometry cannot span the huge orbits of the
prevailing ideas, behold their return, and reconcile their
opposition.  We can only obey our own polarity.  'Tis fine for us to
speculate and elect our course, if we must accept an irresistible
dictation.

        In our first steps to gain our wishes, we come upon immovable
limitations.  We are fired with the hope to reform men.  After many
experiments, we find that we must begin earlier, -- at school.  But
the boys and girls are not docile; we can make nothing of them.  We
decide that they are not of good stock.  We must begin our reform
earlier still, -- at generation: that is to say, there is Fate, or
laws of the world.

        But if there be irresistible dictation, this dictation
understands itself.  If we must accept Fate, we are not less
compelled to affirm liberty, the significance of the individual, the
grandeur of duty, the power of character.  This is true, and that
other is true.  But our geometry cannot span these extreme points,
and reconcile them.  What to do?  By obeying each thought frankly, by
harping, or, if you will, pounding on each string, we learn at last
its power.  By the same obedience to other thoughts, we learn theirs,
and then comes some reasonable hope of harmonizing them.  We are
sure, that, though we know not how, necessity does comport with
liberty, the individual with the world, my polarity with the spirit
of the times.  The riddle of the age has for each a private solution.
If one would study his own time, it must be by this method of taking
up in turn each of the leading topics which belong to our scheme of
human life, and, by firmly stating all that is agreeable to
experience on one, and doing the same justice to the opposing facts
in the others, the true limitations will appear.  Any excess of
emphasis, on one part, would be corrected, and a just balance would
be made.

        But let us honestly state the facts.  Our America has a bad
name for superficialness.  Great men, great nations, have not been
boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have
manned themselves to face it.  The Spartan, embodying his religion in
his country, dies before its majesty without a question.  The Turk,
who believes his doom is written on the iron leaf in the moment when
he entered the world, rushes on the enemy's sabre with undivided
will.  The Turk, the Arab, the Persian, accepts the foreordained
fate.

        "On two days, it steads not to run from thy grave,
                The appointed, and the unappointed day;
        On the first, neither balm nor physician can save,
                Nor thee, on the second, the Universe slay."

        The Hindoo, under the wheel, is as firm.  Our Calvinists, in
the last generation, had something of the same dignity.  They felt
that the weight of the Universe held them down to their place.  What
could _they_ do?  Wise men feel that there is something which cannot
be talked or voted away, -- a strap or belt which girds the world.

        "The Destiny, minister general,
        That executeth in the world o'er all,
        The purveyance which God hath seen beforne,
        So strong it is, that tho' the world had sworn
        The contrary of a thing by yea or nay,
        Yet sometime it shall fallen on a day
        That falleth not oft in a thousand year;
        For, certainly, our appetites here,
        Be it of war, or peace, or hate, or love,
        All this is ruled by the sight above."
                Chaucer: _The Knighte's Tale._

        The Greek Tragedy expressed the same sense: "Whatever is fated,
that will take place.  The great immense mind of Jove is not to be
transgressed."

 
        Savages cling to a local god of one tribe or town.  The broad
ethics of Jesus were quickly narrowed to village theologies, which
preach an election or favoritism.  And, now and then, an amiable
parson, like Jung Stilling, or Robert Huntington, believes in a
pistareen-Providence, which, whenever the good man wants a dinner,
makes that somebody shall knock at his door, and leave a half-dollar.
But Nature is no sentimentalist, -- does not cosset or pamper us.  We
must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind
drowning a man or a woman; but swallows your ship like a grain of
dust.  The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple.  The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons.  The way
of Providence is a little rude.  The habit of snake and spider, the
snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle
of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda, -- these are in
the system, and our habits are like theirs.  You have just dined,
and, however scrupulously the slaughter-house is concealed in the
graceful distance of miles, there is complicity, -- expensive races,
-- race living at the expense of race.  The planet is liable to
shocks from comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from
earthquake and volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of
equinoxes.  Rivers dry up by opening of the forest.  The sea changes
its bed.  Towns and counties fall into it.  At Lisbon, an earthquake
killed men like flies.  At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand
persons were crushed in a few minutes.  The scurvy at sea; the sword
of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New
Orleans, cut off men like a massacre.  Our western prairie shakes
with fever and ague.  The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as
mortal to some tribes, as a frost to the crickets, which, having
filled the summer with noise, are silenced by a fall of the
temperature of one night.  Without uncovering what does not concern
us, or counting how many species of parasites hang on a bombyx; or
groping after intestinal parasites, or infusory biters, or the
obscurities of alternate generation; -- the forms of the shark, the
_labrus_, the jaw of the sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the
weapons of the grampus, and other warriors hidden in the sea, -- are
hints of ferocity in the interiors of nature.  Let us not deny it up
and down.  Providence has a wild, rough, incalculable road to its
end, and it is of no use to try to whitewash its huge, mixed
instrumentalities, or to dress up that terrific benefactor in a clean
shirt and white neckcloth of a student in divinity.

        Will you say, the disasters which threaten mankind are
exceptional, and one need not lay his account for cataclysms every
day?  Aye, but what happens once, may happen again, and so long as
these strokes are not to be parried by us, they must be feared.

        But these shocks and ruins are less destructive to us, than the
stealthy power of other laws which act on us daily.  An expense of
ends to means is fate; -- organization tyrannizing over character.
The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate:
the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically
its limits.  So is the scale of races, of temperaments; so is sex; so
is climate; so is the reaction of talents imprisoning the vital power
in certain directions.  Every spirit makes its house; but afterwards
the house confines the spirit.

        The gross lines are legible to the dull: the cabman is
phrenologist so far: he looks in your face to see if his shilling is
sure.  A dome of brow denotes one thing; a pot-belly another; a
squint, a pug-nose, mats of hair, the pigment of the epidermis,
betray character.  People seem sheathed in their tough organization.
Ask Spurzheim, ask the doctors, ask Quetelet, if temperaments decide
nothing? or if there be any-thing they do not decide?  Read the
description in medical books of the four temperaments, and you will
think you are reading your own thoughts which you had not yet told.
Find the part which black eyes, and which blue eyes, play severally
in the company.  How shall a man escape from his ancestors, or draw
off from his veins the black drop which he drew from his father's or
his mother's life?  It often appears in a family, as if all the
qualities of the progenitors were potted in several jars, -- some
ruling quality in each son or daughter of the house, -- and sometimes
the unmixed temperament, the rank unmitigated elixir, the family
vice, is drawn off in a separate individual, and the others are
proportionally relieved.  We sometimes see a change of expression in
our companion, and say, his father, or his mother, comes to the
windows of his eyes, and sometimes a remote relative.  In different
hours, a man represents each of several of his ancestors, as if there
were seven or eight of us rolled up in each man's skin,-- seven or
eight ancestors at least, -- and they constitute the variety of notes
for that new piece of music which his life is.  At the corner of the
street, you read the possibility of each passenger, in the facial
angle, in the complexion, in the depth of his eye.  His parentage
determines it.  Men are what their mothers made them.  You may as
well ask a loom which weaves huckaback, why it does not make
cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical
discovery from that jobber.  Ask the digger in the ditch to explain
Newton's laws: the fine organs of his brain have been pinched by
overwork and squalid poverty from father to son, for a hundred years.
When each comes forth from his mother's womb, the gate of gifts
closes behind him.  Let him value his hands and feet, he has but one
pair.  So he has but one future, and that is already predetermined in
his lobes, and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and
squat form.  All the privilege and all the legislation of the world
cannot meddle or help to make a poet or a prince of him.

        Jesus said, "When he looketh on her, he hath committed
adultery." But he is an adulterer before he has yet looked on the
woman, by the superfluity of animal, and the defect of thought, in
his constitution.  Who meets him, or who meets her, in the street,
sees that they are ripe to be each other's victim.

        In certain men, digestion and sex absorb the vital force, and
the stronger these are, the individual is so much weaker.  The more
of these drones perish, the better for the hive.  If, later, they
give birth to some superior individual, with force enough to add to
this animal a new aim, and a complete apparatus to work it out, all
the ancestors are gladly forgotten.  Most men and most women are
merely one couple more.  Now and then, one has a new cell or
camarilla opened in his brain, -- an architectural, a musical, or a
philological knack, some stray taste or talent for flowers, or
chemistry, or pigments, or story-telling, a good hand for drawing, a
good foot for dancing, an athletic frame for wide journeying, &c.  --
which skill nowise alters rank in the scale of nature, but serves to
pass the time, the life of sensation going on as before.  At last,
these hints and tendencies are fixed in one, or in a succession.
Each absorbs so much food and force, as to become itself a new
centre.  The new talent draws off so rapidly the vital force, that
not enough remains for the animal functions, hardly enough for
health; so that, in the second generation, if the like genius appear,
the health is visibly deteriorated, and the generative force
impaired.

        People are born with the moral or with the material bias; --
uterine brothers with this diverging destination: and I suppose, with
high magnifiers, Mr. Frauenhofer or Dr. Carpenter might come to
distinguish in the embryo at the fourth day, this is a Whig, and that
a Free-soiler.

        It was a poetic attempt to lift this mountain of Fate, to
reconcile this despotism of race with liberty, which led the Hindoos
to say, "Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of
existence." I find the coincidence of the extremes of eastern and
western speculation in the daring statement of Schelling, "there is
in every man a certain feeling, that he has been what he is from all
eternity, and by no means became such in time." To say it less
sublimely, -- in the history of the individual is always an account
of his condition, and he knows himself to be a party to his present
estate.

        A good deal of our politics is physiological.  Now and then, a
man of wealth in the heyday of youth adopts the tenet of broadest
freedom.  In England, there is always some man of wealth and large
connection planting himself, during all his years of health, on the
side of progress, who, as soon as he begins to die, checks his
forward play, calls in his troops, and becomes conservative.  All
conservatives are such from personal defects.  They have been
effeminated by position or nature, born halt and blind, through
luxury of their parents, and can only, like invalids, act on the
defensive.  But strong natures, backwoodsmen, New Hampshire giants,
Napoleons, Burkes, Broughams, Websters, Kossuths, are inevitable
patriots, until their life ebbs, and their defects and gout, palsy
and money, warp them.

        The strongest idea incarnates itself in majorities and nations,
in the healthiest and strongest.  Probably, the election goes by
avoirdupois weight, and, if you could weigh bodily the tonnage of any
hundred of the Whig and the Democratic party in a town, on the
Dearborn balance, as they passed the hayscales, you could predict
with certainty which party would carry it.  On the whole, it would be
rather the speediest way of deciding the vote, to put the selectmen
or the mayor and aldermen at the hayscales.

        In science, we have to consider two things: power and
circumstance.  All we know of the egg, from each successive
discovery, is, _another vesicle_; and if, after five hundred years,
you get a better observer, or a better glass, he finds within the
last observed another.  In vegetable and animal tissue, it is just
alike, and all that the primary power or spasm operates, is, still,
vesicles, vesicles.  Yes, -- but the tyrannical Circumstance!  A
vesicle in new circumstances, a vesicle lodged in darkness, Oken
thought, became animal; in light, a plant.  Lodged in the parent
animal, it suffers changes, which end in unsheathing miraculous
capability in the unaltered vesicle, and it unlocks itself to fish,
bird, or quadruped, head and foot, eye and claw.  The Circumstance is
Nature.  Nature is, what you may do.  There is much you may not.  We
have two things, -- the circumstance, and the life.  Once we thought,
positive power was all.  Now we learn, that negative power, or
circumstance, is half.  Nature is the tyrannous circumstance, the
thick skull, the sheathed snake, the ponderous, rock-like jaw;
necessitated activity; violent direction; the conditions of a tool,
like the locomotive, strong enough on its track, but which can do
nothing but mischief off of it; or skates, which are wings on the
ice, but fetters on the ground.

        The book of Nature is the book of Fate.  She turns the gigantic
pages, -- leaf after leaf, -- never returning one.  One leaf she lays
down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a
thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of
marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals,
zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians, -- rude forms, in which
she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these
unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king.  The face of the
planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born.  But
when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again.

        The population of the world is a conditional population not the
best, but the best that could live now; and the scale of tribes, and
the steadiness with which victory adheres to one tribe, and defeat to
another, is as uniform as the superposition of strata.  We know in
history what weight belongs to race.  We see the English, French, and
Germans planting themselves on every shore and market of America and
Australia, and monopolizing the commerce of these countries.  We like
the nervous and victorious habit of our own branch of the family.  We
follow the step of the Jew, of the Indian, of the Negro.  We see how
much will has been expended to extinguish the Jew, in vain.  Look at
the unpalatable conclusions of Knox, in his "Fragment of Races," -- a
rash and unsatisfactory writer, but charged with pungent and
unforgetable truths.  "Nature respects race, and not hybrids." "Every
race has its own _habitat_." "Detach a colony from the race, and it
deteriorates to the crab." See the shades of the picture.  The German
and Irish millions, like the Negro, have a great deal of guano in
their destiny.  They are ferried over the Atlantic, and carted over
America, to ditch and to drudge, to make corn cheap, and then to lie
down prematurely to make a spot of green grass on the prairie.

        One more fagot of these adamantine bandages, is, the new
science of Statistics.  It is a rule, that the most casual and
extraordinary events -- if the basis of population is broad enough --
become matter of fixed calculation.  It would not be safe to say when
a captain like Bonaparte, a singer like Jenny Lind, or a navigator
like Bowditch, would be born in Boston: but, on a population of
twenty or two hundred millions, something like accuracy may be had.
(*)

        (*) "Everything which pertains to the human species, considered
as a whole, belongs to the order of physical facts.  The greater the
number of individuals, the more does the influence of the individual
will disappear, leaving predominance to a series of general facts
dependent on causes by which society exists, and is preserved." --
Quetelet.

        'Tis frivolous to fix pedantically the date of particular
inventions.  They have all been invented over and over fifty times.
Man is the arch machine, of which all these shifts drawn from himself
are toy models.  He helps himself on each emergency by copying or
duplicating his own structure, just so far as the need is.  'Tis hard
to find the right Homer Zoroaster, or Menu; harder still to find the
Tubal Cain, or Vulcan, or Cadmus, or Copernicus, or Fust, or Fulton,
the indisputable inventor.  There are scores and centuries of them.
"The air is full of men." This kind of talent so abounds, this
constructive tool-making efficiency, as if it adhered to the chemic
atoms, as if the air he breathes were made of Vaucansons, Franklins,
and Watts.

        Doubtless, in every million there will be an astronomer, a
mathematician, a comic poet, a mystic.  No one can read the history
of astronomy, without perceiving that Copernicus, Newton, Laplace,
are not new men, or a new kind of men, but that Thales, Anaximenes,
Hipparchus, Empedocles, Aristarchus, Pythagoras, ;oEnopides, had
anticipated them; each had the same tense geometrical brain, apt for
the same vigorous computation and logic, a mind parallel to the
movement of the world.  The Roman mile probably rested on a measure
of a degree of the meridian.  Mahometan and Chinese know what we know
of leap-year, of the Gregorian calendar, and of the precession of the
equinoxes.  As, in every barrel of cowries, brought to New Bedford,
there shall be one _orangia_, so there will, in a dozen millions of
Malays and Mahometans, be one or two astronomical skulls.  In a large
city, the most casual things, and things whose beauty lies in their
casualty, are produced as punctually and to order as the baker's
muffin for breakfast.  Punch makes exactly one capital joke a week;
and the journals contrive to furnish one good piece of news every
day.

        And not less work the laws of repression, the penalties of
violated functions.  Famine, typhus, frost, war, suicide, and effete
races, must be reckoned calculable parts of the system of the world.

        These are pebbles from the mountain, hints of the terms by
which our life is walled up, and which show a kind of mechanical
exactness, as of a loom or mill, in what we call casual or fortuitous
events.

        The force with which we resist these torrents of tendency looks
so ridiculously inadequate, that it amounts to little more than a
criticism or a protest made by a minority of one, under compulsion of
millions.  I seemed, in the height of a tempest, to see men overboard
struggling in the waves, and driven about here and there.  They
glanced intelligently at each other, but 'twas little they could do
for one another; 'twas much if each could keep afloat alone.  Well,
they had a right to their eye-beams, and all the rest was Fate.

        We cannot trifle with this reality, this cropping-out in our
planted gardens of the core of the world.  No picture of life can
have any veracity that does not admit the odious facts.  A man's
power is hooped in by a necessity, which, by many experiments, he
touches on every side, until he learns its arc.

        The element running through entire nature, which we popularly
call Fate, is known to us as limitation.  Whatever limits us, we call
Fate.  If we are brute and barbarous, the fate takes a brute and
dreadful shape.  As we refine, our checks become finer.  If we rise
to spiritual culture, the antagonism takes a spiritual form.  In the
Hindoo fables, Vishnu follows Maya through all her ascending changes,
from insect and crawfish up to elephant; whatever form she took, he
took the male form of that kind, until she became at last woman and
goddess, and he a man and a god.  The limitations refine as the soul
purifies, but the ring of necessity is always perched at the top.

        When the gods in the Norse heaven were unable to bind the
Fenris Wolf with steel or with weight of mountains, -- the one he
snapped and the other he spurned with his heel,--they put round his
foot a limp band softer than silk or cobweb, and this held him: the
more he spurned it, the stiffer it drew.  So soft and so stanch is
the ring of Fate.  Neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether,
nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius, can get rid of this
limp band.  For if we give it the high sense in which the poets use
it, even thought itself is not above Fate: that too must act
according to eternal laws, and all that is wilful and fantastic in it
is in opposition to its fundamental essence.

        And, last of all, high over thought, in the world of morals,
Fate appears as vindicator, levelling the high, lifting the low,
requiring justice in man, and always striking soon or late, when
justice is not done.  What is useful will last; what is hurtful will
sink.  "The doer must suffer," said the Greeks: "you would soothe a
Deity not to be soothed." "God himself cannot procure good for the
wicked," said the Welsh triad.  "God may consent, but only for a
time," said the bard of Spain.  The limitation is impassable by any
insight of man.  In its last and loftiest ascensions, insight itself,
and the freedom of the will, is one of its obedient members.  But we
must not run into generalizations too large, but show the natural
bounds or essential distinctions, and seek to do justice to the other
elements as well.

        Thus we trace Fate, in matter, mind, and morals, -- in race, in
retardations of strata, and in thought and character as well.  It is
everywhere bound or limitation.  But Fate has its lord; limitation
its limits; is different seen from above and from below; from within
and from without.  For, though Fate is immense, so is power, which is
the other fact in the dual world, immense.  If Fate follows and
limits power, power attends and antagonizes Fate.  We must respect
Fate as natural history, but there is more than natural history.  For
who and what is this criticism that pries into the matter?  Man is
not order of nature, sack and sack, belly and members, link in a
chain, nor any ignominious baggage, but a stupendous antagonism, a
dragging together of the poles of the Universe.  He betrays his
relation to what is below him, -- thick-skulled, small-brained,
fishy, quadrumanous, -- quadruped ill-disguised, hardly escaped into
biped, and has paid for the new powers by loss of some of the old
ones.  But the lightning which explodes and fashions planets, maker
of planets and suns, is in him.  On one side, elemental order,
sandstone and granite, rock-ledges, peat-bog, forest, sea and shore;
and, on the other part, thought, the spirit which composes and
decomposes nature, -- here they are, side by side, god and devil,
mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding
peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.

        Nor can he blink the freewill.  To hazard the contradiction, --
freedom is necessary.  If you please to plant yourself on the side of
Fate, and say, Fate is all; then we say, a part of Fate is the
freedom of man.  Forever wells up the impulse of choosing and acting
in the soul.  Intellect annuls Fate.  So far as a man thinks, he is
free.  And though nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about
liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for
freedom of some paper preamble like a "Declaration of Independence,"
or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think
or to act, yet it is wholesome to man to look not at Fate, but the
other way: the practical view is the other.  His sound relation to
these facts is to use and command, not to cringe to them.  "Look not
on nature, for her name is fatal," said the oracle.  The too much
contemplation of these limits induces meanness.  They who talk much
of destiny, their birth-star, &c., are in a lower dangerous plane,
and invite the evils they fear.

        I cited the instinctive and heroic races as proud believers in
Destiny.  They conspire with it; a loving resignation is with the
event.  But the dogma makes a different impression, when it is held
by the weak and lazy.  'Tis weak and vicious people who cast the
blame on Fate.  The right use of Fate is to bring up our conduct to
the loftiness of nature.  Rude and invincible except by themselves
are the elements.  So let man be.  Let him empty his breast of his
windy conceits, and show his lordship by manners and deeds on the
scale of nature.  Let him hold his purpose as with the tug of
gravitation.  No power, no persuasion, no bribe shall make him give
up his point.  A man ought to compare advantageously with a river, an
oak, or a mountain.  He shall have not less the flow, the expansion,
and the resistance of these.

        'Tis the best use of Fate to teach a fatal courage.  Go face
the fire at sea, or the cholera in your friend's house, or the
burglar in your own, or what danger lies in the way of duty, knowing
you are guarded by the cherubim of Destiny.  If you believe in Fate
to your harm, believe it, at least, for your good.

        For, if Fate is so prevailing, man also is part of it, and can
confront fate with fate.  If the Universe have these savage
accidents, our atoms are as savage in resistance.  We should be
crushed by the atmosphere, but for the reaction of the air within the
body.  A tube made of a film of glass can resist the shock of the
ocean, if filled with the same water.  If there be omnipotence in the
stroke, there is omnipotence of recoil.

        1. But Fate against Fate is only parrying and defence: there
are, also, the noble creative forces.  The revelation of Thought
takes man out of servitude into freedom.  We rightly say of
ourselves, we were born, and afterward we were born again, and many
times.  We have successive experiences so important, that the new
forgets the old, and hence the mythology of the seven or the nine
heavens.  The day of days, the great day of the feast of life, is
that in which the inward eye opens to the Unity in things, to the
omnipresence of law; -- sees that what is must be, and ought to be,
or is the best.  This beatitude dips from on high down on us, and we
see.  It is not in us so much as we are in it.  If the air come to
our lungs, we breathe and live; if not, we die.  If the light come to
our eyes, we see; else not.  And if truth come to our mind, we
suddenly expand to its dimensions, as if we grew to worlds.  We are
as lawgivers; we speak for Nature; we prophesy and divine.

        This insight throws us on the party and interest of the
Universe, against all and sundry; against ourselves, as much as
others.  A man speaking from insight affirms of himself what is true
of the mind: seeing its immortality, he says, I am immortal; seeing
its invincibility, he says, I am strong.  It is not in us, but we are
in it.  It is of the maker, not of what is made.  All things are
touched and changed by it.  This uses, and is not used.  It distances
those who share it, from those who share it not.  Those who share it
not are flocks and herds.  It dates from itself; -- not from former
men or better men, -- gospel, or constitution, or college, or custom.
Where it shines, Nature is no longer intrusive, but all things make a
musical or pictorial impression.  The world of men show like a comedy
without laughter: -- populations, interests, government, history; --
'tis all toy figures in a toy house.  It does not overvalue
particular truths.  We hear eagerly every thought and word quoted
from an intellectual man.  But, in his presence, our own mind is
roused to activity, and we forget very fast what he says, much more
interested in the new play of our own thought, than in any thought of
his.  'Tis the majesty into which we have suddenly mounted, the
impersonality, the scorn of egotisms, the sphere of laws, that engage
us.  Once we were stepping a little this way, and a little that way;
now, we are as men in a balloon, and do not think so much of the
point we have left, or the point we would make, as of the liberty and
glory of the way.

        Just as much intellect as you add, so much organic power.  He
who sees through the design, presides over it, and must will that
which must be.  We sit and rule, and, though we sleep, our dream will
come to pass.  Our thought, though it were only an hour old, affirms
an oldest necessity, not to be separated from thought, and not to be
separated from will.  They must always have coexisted.  It apprises
us of its sovereignty and godhead, which refuse to be severed from
it.  It is not mine or thine, but the will of all mind.  It is poured
into the souls of all men, as the soul itself which constitutes them
men.  I know not whether there be, as is alleged, in the upper region
of our atmosphere, a permanent westerly current, which carries with
it all atoms which rise to that height, but I see, that when souls
reach a certain clearness of perception, they accept a knowledge and
motive above selfishness.  A breath of will blows eternally through
the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary.
It is the air which all intellects inhale and exhale, and it is the
wind which blows the worlds into order and orbit.

        Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind
up into a sphere where all is plastic.  Of two men, each obeying his
own thought, he whose thought is deepest will be the strongest
character.  Always one man more than another represents the will of
Divine Providence to the period.

        2. If thought makes free, so does the moral sentiment.  The
mixtures of spiritual chemistry refuse to be analyzed.  Yet we can
see that with the perception of truth is joined the desire that it
shall prevail.  That affection is essential to will.  Moreover, when
a strong will appears, it usually results from a certain unity of
organization, as if the whole energy of body and mind flowed in one
direction.  All great force is real and elemental.  There is no
manufacturing a strong will.  There must be a pound to balance a
pound.  Where power is shown in will, it must rest on the universal
force.  Alaric and Bonaparte must believe they rest on a truth, or
their will can be bought or bent.  There is a bribe possible for any
finite will.  But the pure sympathy with universal ends is an
infinite force, and cannot be bribed or bent.  Whoever has had
experience of the moral sentiment cannot choose but believe in
unlimited power.  Each pulse from that heart is an oath from the Most
High.  I know not what the word _sublime_ means, if it be not the
intimations in this infant of a terrific force.  A text of heroism, a
name and anecdote of courage, are not arguments, but sallies of
freedom.  One of these is the verse of the Persian Hafiz, "'Tis
written on the gate of Heaven, `Wo unto him who suffers himself to be
betrayed by Fate!'" Does the reading of history make us fatalists?
What courage does not the opposite opinion show!  A little whim of
will to be free gallantly contending against the universe of
chemistry.

        But insight is not will, nor is affection will.  Perception is
cold, and goodness dies in wishes; as Voltaire said, 'tis the
misfortune of worthy people that they are cowards; _"un des plus
grands malheurs des honnetes gens c'est qu'ils sont des lafaches."_
There must be a fusion of these two to generate the energy of will.
There can be no driving force, except through the conversion of the
man into his will, making him the will, and the will him.  And one
may say boldly, that no man has a right perception of any truth, who
has not been reacted on by it, so as to be ready to be its martyr.

        The one serious and formidable thing in nature is a will.
Society is servile from want of will, and therefore the world wants
saviours and religions.  One way is right to go: the hero sees it,
and moves on that aim, and has the world under him for root and
support.  He is to others as the world.  His approbation is honor;
his dissent, infamy.  The glance of his eye has the force of
sunbeams.  A personal influence towers up in memory only worthy, and
we gladly forget numbers, money, climate, gravitation, and the rest
of Fate.

        We can afford to allow the limitation, if we know it is the
meter of the growing man.  We stand against Fate, as children stand
up against the wall in their father's house, and notch their height
from year to year.  But when the boy grows to man, and is master of
the house, he pulls down that wall, and builds a new and bigger.
'Tis only a question of time.  Every brave youth is in training to
ride and rule this dragon.  His science is to make weapons and wings
of these passions and retarding forces.  Now whether, seeing these
two things, fate and power, we are permitted to believe in unity?
The bulk of mankind believe in two gods.  They are under one dominion
here in the house, as friend and parent, in social circles, in
letters, in art, in love, in religion: but in mechanics, in dealing
with steam and climate, in trade, in politics, they think they come
under another; and that it would be a practical blunder to transfer
the method and way of working of one sphere, into the other.  What
good, honest, generous men at home, will be wolves and foxes on
change!  What pious men in the parlor will vote for what reprobates
at the polls!  To a certain point, they believe themselves the care
of a Providence.  But, in a steamboat, in an epidemic, in war, they
believe a malignant energy rules.

        But relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes,
but everywhere and always.  The divine order does not stop where
their sight stops.  The friendly power works on the same rules, in
the next farm, and the next planet.  But, where they have not
experience, they run against it, and hurt themselves.  Fate, then, is
a name for facts not yet passed under the fire of thought; -- for
causes which are unpenetrated.

        But every jet of chaos which threatens to exterminate us, is
convertible by intellect into wholesome force.  Fate is unpenetrated
causes.  The water drowns ship and sailor, like a grain of dust.  But
learn to swim, trim your bark, and the wave which drowned it, will be
cloven by it, and carry it, like its own foam, a plume and a power.
The cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a
man like a dew-drop.  But learn to skate, and the ice will give you a
graceful, sweet, and poetic motion.  The cold will brace your limbs
and brain to genius, and make you foremost men of time.  Cold and sea
will train an imperial Saxon race, which nature cannot bear to lose,
and, after cooping it up for a thousand years in yonder England,
gives a hundred Englands, a hundred Mexicos.  All the bloods it shall
absorb and domineer: and more than Mexicos, -- the secrets of water
and steam, the spasms of electricity, the ductility of metals, the
chariot of the air, the ruddered balloon are awaiting you.

 
        The annual slaughter from typhus far exceeds that of war; but
right drainage destroys typhus.  The plague in the sea-service from
scurvy is healed by lemon juice and other diets portable or
procurable: the depopulation by cholera and small-pox is ended by
drainage and vaccination; and every other pest is not less in the
chain of cause and effect, and may be fought off.  And, whilst art
draws out the venom, it commonly extorts some benefit from the
vanquished enemy.  The mischievous torrent is taught to drudge for
man: the wild beasts he makes useful for food, or dress, or labor;
the chemic explosions are controlled like his watch.  These are now
the steeds on which he rides.  Man moves in all modes, by legs of
horses, by wings of wind, by steam, by gas of balloon, by
electricity, and stands on tiptoe threatening to hunt the eagle in
his own element.  There's nothing he will not make his carrier.

        Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we dreaded.
Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its
cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and
carry the house away.  But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton
bethought themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was
God; that it must be availed of, and not by any means let off and
wasted.  Could he lift pots and roofs and houses so handily? he was
the workman they were in search of.  He could be used to lift away,
chain, and compel other devils, far more reluctant and dangerous,
namely, cubic miles of earth, mountains, weight or resistance of
water, machinery, and the labors of all men in the world; and time he
shall lengthen, and shorten space.

        It has not fared much otherwise with higher kinds of steam.
The opinion of the million was the terror of the world, and it was
attempted, either to dissipate it, by amusing nations, or to pile it
over with strata of society, -- a layer of soldiers; over that, a
layer of lords; and a king on the top; with clamps and hoops of
castles, garrisons, and police.  But, sometimes, the religious
principle would get in, and burst the hoops, and rive every mountain
laid on top of it.  The Fultons and Watts of politics, believing in
unity, saw that it was a power, and, by satisfying it, (as justice
satisfies everybody,) through a different disposition of society, --
grouping it on a level, instead of piling it into a mountain, -- they
have contrived to make of his terror the most harmless and energetic
form of a State.

        Very odious, I confess, are the lessons of Fate.  Who likes to
have a dapper phrenologist pronouncing on his fortunes?  Who likes to
believe that he has hidden in his skull, spine, and pelvis, all the
vices of a Saxon or Celtic race, which will be sure to pull him down,
-- with what grandeur of hope and resolve he is fired, -- into a
selfish, huckstering, servile, dodging animal?  A learned physician
tells us, the fact is invariable with the Neapolitan, that, when
mature, he assumes the forms of the unmistakable scoundrel.  That is
a little overstated, -- but may pass.

        But these are magazines and arsenals.  A man must thank his
defects, and stand in some terror of his talents.  A transcendent
talent draws so largely on his forces, as to lame him; a defect pays
him revenues on the other side.  The sufferance, which is the badge
of the Jew, has made him, in these days, the ruler of the rulers of
the earth.  If Fate is ore and quarry, if evil is good in the making,
if limitation is power that shall be, if calamities, oppositions, and
weights are wings and means, -- we are reconciled.

        Fate involves the melioration.  No statement of the Universe
can have any soundness, which does not admit its ascending effort.
The direction of the whole, and of the parts, is toward benefit, and
in proportion to the health.  Behind every individual, closes
organization: before him, opens liberty, -- the Better, the Best.
The first and worst races are dead.  The second and imperfect races
are dying out, or remain for the maturing of higher.  In the latest
race, in man, every generosity, every new perception, the love and
praise he extorts from his fellows, are certificates of advance out
of fate into freedom.  Liberation of the will from the sheaths and
clogs of organization which he has outgrown, is the end and aim of
this world.  Every calamity is a spur and valuable hint; and where
his endeavors do not yet fully avail, they tell as tendency.  The
whole circle of animal life, -- tooth against tooth, -- devouring
war, war for food, a yelp of pain and a grunt of triumph, until, at
last, the whole menagerie, the whole chemical mass is mellowed and
refined for higher use, -- pleases at a sufficient perspective.

        But to see how fate slides into freedom, and freedom into fate,
observe how far the roots of every creature run, or find, if you can,
a point where there is no thread of connection.  Our life is
consentaneous and far-related.  This knot of nature is so well tied,
that nobody was ever cunning enough to find the two ends.  Nature is
intricate, overlapped, interweaved, and endless.  Christopher Wren
said of the beautiful King's College chapel, "that, if anybody would
tell him where to lay the first stone, he would build such another."
But where shall we find the first atom in this house of man, which is
all consent, inosculation, and balance of parts?

        The web of relation is shown in _habitat_, shown in
hybernation.  When hybernation was observed, it was found, that,
whilst some animals became torpid in winter, others were torpid in
summer: hybernation then was a false name.  The _long sleep_ is not
an effect of cold, but is regulated by the supply of food proper to
the animal.  It becomes torpid when the fruit or prey it lives on is
not in season, and regains its activity when its food is ready.

        Eyes are found in light; ears in auricular air; feet on land;
fins in water; wings in air; and, each creature where it was meant to
be, with a mutual fitness.  Every zone has its own _Fauna_.  There is
adjustment between the animal and its food, its parasite, its enemy.
Balances are kept.  It is not allowed to diminish in numbers, nor to
exceed.  The like adjustments exist for man.  His food is cooked,
when he arrives; his coal in the pit; the house ventilated; the mud
of the deluge dried; his companions arrived at the same hour, and
awaiting him with love, concert, laughter, and tears.  These are
coarse adjustments, but the invisible are not less.  There are more
belongings to every creature than his air and his food.  His
instincts must be met, and he has predisposing power that bends and
fits what is near him to his use.  He is not possible until the
invisible things are right for him, as well as the visible.  Of what
changes, then, in sky and earth, and in finer skies and earths, does
the appearance of some Dante or Columbus apprise us!

        How is this effected?  Nature is no spendthrift, but takes the
shortest way to her ends.  As the general says to his soldiers, "if
you want a fort, build a fort," so nature makes every creature do its
own work and get its living, -- is it planet, animal, or tree.  The
planet makes itself.  The animal cell makes itself; -- then, what it
wants.  Every creature, -- wren or dragon, -- shall make its own
lair.  As soon as there is life, there is self-direction, and
absorbing and using of material.  Life is freedom, -- life in the
direct ratio of its amount.  You may be sure, the new-born man is not
inert.  Life works both voluntarily and supernaturally in its
neighborhood.  Do you suppose, he can be estimated by his weight in
pounds, or, that he is contained in his skin, -- this reaching,
radiating, jaculating fellow?  The smallest candle fills a mile with
its rays, and the papillae of a man run out to every star.

        When there is something to be done, the world knows how to get
it done.  The vegetable eye makes leaf, pericarp, root, bark, or
thorn, as the need is; the first cell converts itself into stomach,
mouth, nose, or nail, according to the want: the world throws its
life into a hero or a shepherd; and puts him where he is wanted.
Dante and Columbus were Italians, in their time: they would be
Russians or Americans to-day.  Things ripen, new men come.  The
adaptation is not capricious.  The ulterior aim, the purpose beyond
itself, the correlation by which planets subside and crystallize,
then animate beasts and men, will not stop, but will work into finer
particulars, and from finer to finest.

        The secret of the world is, the tie between person and event.
Person makes event, and event person.  The "times," "the age," what
is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who
epitomize the times?  -- Goethe, Hegel, Metternich, Adams, Calhoun,
Guizot, Peel, Cobden, Kossuth, Rothschild, Astor, Brunel, and the
rest.  The same fitness must be presumed between a man and the time
and event, as between the sexes, or between a race of animals and the
food it eats, or the inferior races it uses.  He thinks his fate
alien, because the copula is hidden.  But the soul contains the event
that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its
thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.  The
event is the print of your form.  It fits you like your skin.  What
each does is proper to him.  Events are the children of his body and
mind.  We learn that the soul of Fate is the soul of us, as Hafiz
sings,

        Alas! till now I had not known,
        My guide and fortune's guide are one.
 
        All the toys that infatuate men, and which they play for, --
houses, land, money, luxury, power, fame, are the selfsame thing,
with a new gauze or two of illusion overlaid.  And of all the drums
and rattles by which men are made willing to have their heads broke,
and are led out solemnly every morning to parade, -- the most
admirable is this by which we are brought to believe that events are
arbitrary, and independent of actions.  At the conjuror's, we detect
the hair by which he moves his puppet, but we have not eyes sharp
enough to descry the thread that ties cause and effect.

        Nature magically suits the man to his fortunes, by making these
the fruit of his character.  Ducks take to the water, eagles to the
sky, waders to the sea margin, hunters to the forest, clerks to
counting-rooms, soldiers to the frontier.  Thus events grow on the
same stem with persons; are sub-persons.  The pleasure of life is
according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or
the place.  Life is an ecstasy.  We know what madness belongs to
love, -- what power to paint a vile object in hues of heaven.  As
insane persons are indifferent to their dress, diet, and other
accommodations, and, as we do in dreams, with equanimity, the most
absurd acts, so, a drop more of wine in our cup of life will
reconcile us to strange company and work.  Each creature puts forth
from itself its own condition and sphere, as the slug sweats out its
slimy house on the pear-leaf, and the woolly aphides on the apple
perspire their own bed, and the fish its shell.  In youth, we clothe
ourselves with rainbows, and go as brave as the zodiac.  In age, we
put out another sort of perspiration, -- gout, fever, rheumatism,
caprice, doubt, fretting, and avarice.

        A man's fortunes are the fruit of his character.  A man's
friends are his magnetisms.  We go to Herodotus and Plutarch for
examples of Fate; but we are examples.  _"Quisque suos patimur
manes."_ The tendency of every man to enact all that is in his
constitution is expressed in the old belief, that the efforts which
we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it: and
I have noticed, a man likes better to be complimented on his
position, as the proof of the last or total excellence, than on his
merits.

        A man will see his character emitted in the events that seem to
meet, but which exude from and accompany him.  Events expand with the
character.  As once he found himself among toys, so now he plays a
part in colossal systems, and his growth is declared in his ambition,
his companions, and his performance.  He looks like a piece of luck,
but is a piece of causation; -- the mosaic, angulated and ground to
fit into the gap he fills.  Hence in each town there is some man who
is, in his brain and performance, an explanation of the tillage,
production, factories, banks, churches, ways of living, and society,
of that town.  If you do not chance to meet him, all that you see
will leave you a little puzzled: if you see him, it will become
plain.  We know in Massachusetts who built New Bedford, who built
Lynn, Lowell, Lawrence, Clinton, Fitchburg, Holyoke, Portland, and
many another noisy mart.  Each of these men, if they were
transparent, would seem to you not so much men, as walking cities,
and, wherever you put them, they would build one.

        History is the action and reaction of these two, -- Nature and
Thought; -- two boys pushing each other on the curb-stone of the
pavement.  Everything is pusher or pushed: and matter and mind are in
perpetual tilt and balance, so.  Whilst the man is weak, the earth
takes up him.  He plants his brain and affections.  By and by he will
take up the earth, and have his gardens and vineyards in the
beautiful order and productiveness of his thought.  Every solid in
the universe is ready to become fluid on the approach of the mind,
and the power to flux it is the measure of the mind.  If the wall
remain adamant, it accuses the want of thought.  To a subtler force,
it will stream into new forms, expressive of the character of the
mind.  What is the city in which we sit here, but an aggregate of
incongruous materials, which have obeyed the will of some man?  The
granite was reluctant, but his hands were stronger, and it came.
Iron was deep in the ground, and well combined with stone; but could
not hide from his fires.  Wood, lime, stuffs, fruits, gums, were
dispersed over the earth and sea, in vain.  Here they are, within
reach of every man's day-labor, -- what he wants of them.  The whole
world is the flux of matter over the wires of thought to the poles or
points where it would build.  The races of men rise out of the ground
preoccupied with a thought which rules them, and divided into parties
ready armed and angry to fight for this metaphysical abstraction.
The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman,
the Austrian and the American.  The men who come on the stage at one
period are all found to be related to each other.  Certain ideas are
in the air.  We are all impressionable, for we are made of them; all
impressionable, but some more than others, and these first express
them.  This explains the curious contemporaneousness of inventions
and discoveries.  The truth is in the air, and the most
impressionable brain will announce it first, but all will announce it
a few minutes later.  So women, as most susceptible, are the best
index of the coming hour.  So the great man, that is, the man most
imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man, -- of
a fibre irritable and delicate, like iodine to light.  He feels the
infinitesimal attractions.  His mind is righter than others, because
he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle
delicately poised.

        The correlation is shown in defects.  Moller, in his Essay on
Architecture, taught that the building which was fitted accurately to
answer its end, would turn out to be beautiful, though beauty had not
been intended.  I find the like unity in human structures rather
virulent and pervasive; that a crudity in the blood will appear in
the argument; a hump in the shoulder will appear in the speech and
handiwork.  If his mind could be seen, the hump would be seen.  If a
man has a seesaw in his voice, it will run into his sentences, into
his poem, into the structure of his fable, into his speculation, into
his charity.  And, as every man is hunted by his own daemon, vexed by
his own disease, this checks all his activity.

        So each man, like each plant, has his parasites.  A strong,
astringent, bilious nature has more truculent enemies than the slugs
and moths that fret my leaves.  Such an one has curculios, borers,
knife-worms: a swindler ate him first, then a client, then a quack,
then smooth, plausible gentlemen, bitter and selfish as Moloch.

 
        This correlation really existing can be divined.  If the
threads are there, thought can follow and show them.  Especially when
a soul is quick and docile; as Chaucer sings,

        "Or if the soul of proper kind
        Be so perfect as men find,
        That it wot what is to come,
        And that he warneth all and some
        Of every of their aventures,
        By previsions or figures;
        But that our flesh hath not might
        It to understand aright
        For it is warned too darkly." --
 
        Some people are made up of rhyme, coincidence, omen,
periodicity, and presage: they meet the person they seek; what their
companion prepares to say to them, they first say to him; and a
hundred signs apprise them of what is about to befall.

        Wonderful intricacy in the web, wonderful constancy in the
design this vagabond life admits.  We wonder how the fly finds its
mate, and yet year after year we find two men, two women, without
legal or carnal tie, spend a great part of their best time within a
few feet of each other.  And the moral is, that what we seek we shall
find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, "what we wish
for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age," too often cursed with
the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since
we are sure of having what we wish, we beware to ask only for high
things.

        One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one
solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge,
exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness.  A man
must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public
nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from
horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other
foot on the back of the other.  So when a man is the victim of his
fate, has sciatica in his loins, and cramp in his mind; a club-foot
and a club in his wit; a sour face, and a selfish temper; a strut in
his gait, and a conceit in his affection; or is ground to powder by
the vice of his race; he is to rally on his relation to the Universe,
which his ruin benefits.  Leaving the daemon who suffers, he is to
take sides with the Deity who secures universal benefit by his pain.

        To offset the drag of temperament and race, which pulls down,
learn this lesson, namely, that by the cunning copresence of two
elements, which is throughout nature, whatever lames or paralyzes
you, draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay.  A good
intention clothes itself with sudden power.  When a god wishes to
ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and
serve him for a horse.

        Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and
souls in perfect solution, and compels every atom to serve an
universal end.  I do not wonder at a snow-flake, a shell, a summer
landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty
under which the universe lies; that all is and must be pictorial;
that the rainbow, and the curve of the horizon, and the arch of the
blue vault are only results from the organism of the eye.  There is
no need for foolish amateurs to fetch me to admire a garden of
flowers, or a sun-gilt cloud, or a waterfall, when I cannot look
without seeing splendor and grace.  How idle to choose a random
sparkle here or there, when the indwelling necessity plants the rose
of beauty on the brow of chaos, and discloses the central intention
of Nature to be harmony and joy.

        Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity.  If we thought
men were free in the sense, that, in a single exception one
fantastical will could prevail over the law of things, it were all
one as if a child's hand could pull down the sun.  If, in the least
particular, one could derange the order of nature, -- who would
accept the gift of life?

        Let us build altars to the Beautiful Necessity, which secures
that all is made of one piece; that plaintiff and defendant, friend
and enemy, animal and planet, food and eater, are of one kind.  In
astronomy, is vast space, but no foreign system; in geology, vast
time, but the same laws as to-day.  Why should we be afraid of
Nature, which is no other than "philosophy and theology embodied"?
Why should we fear to be crushed by savage elements, we who are made
up of the same elements?  Let us build to the Beautiful Necessity,
which makes man brave in believing that he cannot shun a danger that
is appointed, nor incur one that is not; to the Necessity which
rudely or softly educates him to the perception that there are no
contingencies; that Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is
not intelligent but intelligence, -- not personal nor impersonal, --
it disdains words and passes understanding; it dissolves persons; it
vivifies nature; yet solicits the pure in heart to draw on all its
omnipotence.

 
        II
 
        POWER
 
        His tongue was framed to music,
        And his hand was armed with skill,
        His face was the mould of beauty,
        And his heart the throne of will.
 
 
        _Power_

        There is not yet any inventory of a man's faculties, any more
than a bible of his opinions.  Who shall set a limit to the influence
of a human being?  There are men, who, by their sympathetic
attractions, carry nations with them, and lead the activity of the
human race.  And if there be such a tie, that, wherever the mind of
man goes, nature will accompany him, perhaps there are men whose
magnetisms are of that force to draw material and elemental powers,
and, where they appear, immense instrumentalities organize around
them.  Life is a search after power; and this is an element with
which the world is so saturated, -- there is no chink or crevice in
which it is not lodged, -- that no honest seeking goes unrewarded.  A
man should prize events and possessions as the ore in which this fine
mineral is found; and he can well afford to let events and
possessions, and the breath of the body go, if their value has been
added to him in the shape of power.  If he have secured the elixir,
he can spare the wide gardens from which it was distilled.  A
cultivated man, wise to know and bold to perform, is the end to which
nature works, and the education of the will is the flowering and
result of all this geology and astronomy.

        All successful men have agreed in one thing, -- they were
_causationists_.  They believed that things went not by luck, but by
law; that there was not a weak or a cracked link in the chain that
joins the first and last of things.  A belief in causality, or strict
connection between every trifle and the principle of being, and, in
consequence, belief in compensation, or, that nothing is got for
nothing, -- characterizes all valuable minds, and must control every
effort that is made by an industrious one.  The most valiant men are
the best believers in the tension of the laws.  "All the great
captains," said Bonaparte, "have performed vast achievements by
conforming with the rules of the art, -- by adjusting efforts to
obstacles."

        The key to the age may be this, or that, or the other, as the
young orators describe; -- the key to all ages is -- Imbecility;
imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in
heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity,
custom, and fear.  This gives force to the strong, -- that the
multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.

        We must reckon success a constitutional trait.  Courage, -- the
old physicians taught, (and their meaning holds, if their physiology
is a little mythical,) -- courage, or the degree of life, is as the
degree of circulation of the blood in the arteries.  "During passion,
anger, fury, trials of strength, wrestling, fighting, a large amount
of blood is collected in the arteries, the maintenance of bodily
strength requiring it, and but little is sent into the veins.  This
condition is constant with intrepid persons." Where the arteries hold
their blood, is courage and adventure possible.  Where they pour it
unrestrained into the veins, the spirit is low and feeble.  For
performance of great mark, it needs extraordinary health.  If Eric is
in robust health, and has slept well, and is at the top of his
condition, and thirty years old, at his departure from Greenland, he
will steer west, and his ships will reach Newfoundland.  But take out
Eric, and put in a stronger and bolder man, -- Biorn, or Thorfin, --
and the ships will, with just as much ease, sail six hundred, one
thousand, fifteen hundred miles further, and reach Labrador and New
England.  There is no chance in results.  With adults, as with
children, one class enter cordially into the game, and whirl with the
whirling world; the others have cold hands, and remain bystanders; or
are only dragged in by the humor and vivacity of those who can carry
a dead weight.  The first wealth is health.  Sickness is
poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its
resources to live.  But health or fulness answers its own ends, and
has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks
of other men's necessities.

        All power is of one kind, a sharing of the nature of the world.
The mind that is parallel with the laws of nature will be in the
current of events, and strong with their strength.  One man is made
of the same stuff of which events are made; is in sympathy with the
course of things; can predict it.  Whatever befalls, befalls him
first; so that he is equal to whatever shall happen.  A man who knows
men, can talk well on politics, trade, law, war, religion.  For,
everywhere, men are led in the same manners.

 
        The advantage of a strong pulse is not to be supplied by any
labor, art, or concert.  It is like the climate, which easily rears a
crop, which no glass, or irrigation, or tillage, or manures, can
elsewhere rival.  It is like the opportunity of a city like New York,
or Constantinople, which needs no diplomacy to force capital or
genius or labor to it.  They come of themselves, as the waters flow
to it.  So a broad, healthy, massive understanding seems to lie on
the shore of unseen rivers, of unseen oceans, which are covered with
barks, that, night and day, are drifted to this point.  That is
poured into its lap, which other men lie plotting for.  It is in
everybody's secret; anticipates everybody's discovery; and if it do
not command every fact of the genius and the scholar, it is because
it is large and sluggish, and does not think them worth the exertion
which you do.

        This affirmative force is in one, and is not in another, as one
horse has the spring in him, and another in the whip.  "On the neck
of the young man," said Hafiz, "sparkles no gem so gracious as
enterprise." Import into any stationary district, as into an old
Dutch population in New York or Pennsylvania, or among the planters
of Virginia, a colony of hardy Yankees, with seething brains, heads
full of steam-hammer, pulley, crank, and toothed wheel, -- and
everything begins to shine with values.  What enhancement to all the
water and land in England, is the arrival of James Watt or Brunel!
In every company, there is not only the active and passive sex, but,
in both men and women, a deeper and more important _sex of mind_,
namely, the inventive or creative class of both men and women, and
the uninventive or accepting class.  Each _plus_ man represents his
set, and, if he have the accidental advantage of personal ascendency,
-- which implies neither more nor less of talent, but merely the
temperamental or taming eye of a soldier or a schoolmaster, (which
one has, and one has not, as one has a black moustache and one a
blond,) then quite easily and without envy or resistance, all his
coadjutors and feeders will admit his right to absorb them.  The
merchant works by book-keeper and cashier; the lawyer's authorities
are hunted up by clerks; the geologist reports the surveys of his
subalterns; Commander Wilkes appropriates the results of all the
naturalists attached to the Expedition; Thorwaldsen's statue is
finished by stone-cutters; Dumas has journeymen; and Shakspeare was
theatre-manager, and used the labor of many young men, as well as the
playbooks.

        There is always room for a man of force, and he makes room for
many.  Society is a troop of thinkers, and the best heads among them
take the best places.  A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced
and tilled, the houses that are built.  The strong man sees the
possible houses and farms.  His eye makes estates, as fast as the sun
breeds clouds.

        When a new boy comes into school, when a man travels, and
encounters strangers every day, or, when into any old club a new
comer is domesticated, that happens which befalls, when a strange ox
is driven into a pen or pasture where cattle are kept; there is at
once a trial of strength between the best pair of horns and the new
comer, and it is settled thenceforth which is the leader.  So now,
there is a measuring of strength, very courteous, but decisive, and
an acquiescence thenceforward when these two meet.  Each reads his
fate in the other's eyes.  The weaker party finds, that none of his
information or wit quite fits the occasion.  He thought he knew this
or that: he finds that he omitted to learn the end of it.  Nothing
that he knows will quite hit the mark, whilst all the rival's arrows
are good, and well thrown.  But if he knew all the facts in the
encyclopaedia, it would not help him: for this is an affair of
presence of mind, of attitude, of aplomb: the opponent has the sun
and wind, and, in every cast, the choice of weapon and mark; and,
when he himself is matched with some other antagonist, his own shafts
fly well and hit.  'Tis a question of stomach and constitution.  The
second man is as good as the first, -- perhaps better; but has not
stoutness or stomach, as the first has, and so his wit seems
over-fine or under-fine.

        Health is good, -- power, life, that resists disease, poison,
and all enemies, and is conservative, as well as creative.  Here is
question, every spring, whether to graft with wax, or whether with
clay; whether to whitewash or to potash, or to prune; but the one
point is the thrifty tree.  A good tree, that agrees with the soil,
will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by
night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments.  Vivacity,
leadership, must be had, and we are not allowed to be nice in
choosing.  We must fetch the pump with dirty water, if clean cannot
be had.  If we will make bread, we must have contagion, yeast,
emptyings, or what not, to induce fermentation into the dough: as the
torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by
friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.  And we have a certain
instinct, that where is great amount of life, though gross and
peccant, it has its own checks and purifications, and will be found
at last in harmony with moral laws.

        We watch in children with pathetic interest, the degree in
which they possess recuperative force.  When they are hurt by us, or
by each other, or go to the bottom of the class, or miss the annual
prizes, or are beaten in the game, -- if they lose heart, and
remember the mischance in their chamber at home, they have a serious
check.  But if they have the buoyancy and resistance that preoccupies
them with new interest in the new moment, -- the wounds cicatrize,
and the fibre is the tougher for the hurt.

        One comes to value this _plus_ health, when he sees that all
difficulties vanish before it.  A timid man listening to the
alarmists in Congress, and in the newspapers, and observing the
profligacy of party, -- sectional interests urged with a fury which
shuts its eyes to consequences, with a mind made up to desperate
extremities, ballot in one hand, and rifle in the other, -- might
easily believe that he and his country have seen their best days, and
he hardens himself the best he can against the coming ruin.  But,
after this has been foretold with equal confidence fifty times, and
government six per cents have not declined a quarter of a mill, he
discovers that the enormous elements of strength which are here in
play, make our politics unimportant.  Personal power, freedom, and
the resources of nature strain every faculty of every citizen.  We
prosper with such vigor, that, like thrifty trees, which grow in
spite of ice, lice, mice, and borers, so we do not suffer from the
profligate swarms that fatten on the national treasury.  The huge
animals nourish huge parasites, and the rancor of the disease attests
the strength of the constitution.  The same energy in the Greek
_Demos_ drew the remark, that the evils of popular government appear
greater than they are; there is compensation for them in the spirit
and energy it awakens.  The rough and ready style which belongs to a
people of sailors, foresters, farmers, and mechanics, has its
advantages.  Power educates the potentate.  As long as our people
quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions.  A Western
lawyer of eminence said to me he wished it were a penal offence to
bring an English law-book into a court in this country, so pernicious
had he found in his experience our deference to English precedent.
The very word `commerce' has only an English meaning, and is pinched
to the cramp exigencies of English experience.  The commerce of
rivers, the commerce of railroads, and who knows but the commerce of
air-balloons, must add an American extension to the pond-hole of
admiralty.  As long as our people quote English standards, they will
miss the sovereignty of power; but let these rough riders, --
legislators in shirt-sleeves, -- Hoosier, Sucker, Wolverine, Badger,
-- or whatever hard head Arkansas, Oregon, or Utah sends, half
orator, half assassin, to represent its wrath and cupidity at
Washington, -- let these drive as they may; and the disposition of
territories and public lands, the necessity of balancing and keeping
at bay the snarling majorities of German, Irish, and of native
millions, will bestow promptness, address, and reason, at last, on
our buffalo-hunter, and authority and majesty of manners.  The
instinct of the people is right.  Men expect from good whigs, put
into office by the respectability of the country, much less skill to
deal with Mexico, Spain, Britain, or with our own malcontent members,
than from some strong transgressor, like Jefferson, or Jackson, who
first conquers his own government, and then uses the same genius to
conquer the foreigner.  The senators who dissented from Mr. Polk's
Mexican war, were not those who knew better, but those who, from
political position, could afford it; not Webster, but Benton and
Calhoun.

        This power, to be sure, is not clothed in satin.  'Tis the
power of Lynch law, of soldiers and pirates; and it bullies the
peaceable and loyal.  But it brings its own antidote; and here is my
point, -- that all kinds of power usually emerge at the same time;
good energy, and bad; power of mind, with physical health; the
ecstasies of devotion, with the exasperations of debauchery.  The
same elements are always present, only sometimes these conspicuous,
and sometimes those; what was yesterday foreground, being to-day
background, -- what was surface, playing now a not less effective
part as basis.  The longer the drought lasts, the more is the
atmosphere surcharged with water.  The faster the ball falls to the
sun, the force to fly off is by so much augmented.  And, in morals,
wild liberty breeds iron conscience; natures with great impulses have
great resources, and return from far.  In politics, the sons of
democrats will be whigs; whilst red republicanism, in the father, is
a spasm of nature to engender an intolerable tyrant in the next age.
On the other hand, conservatism, ever more timorous and narrow,
disgusts the children, and drives them for a mouthful of fresh air
into radicalism.

        Those who have most of this coarse energy, -- the `bruisers,'
who have run the gauntlet of caucus and tavern through the county or
the state, have their own vices, but they have the good nature of
strength and courage.  Fierce and unscrupulous, they are usually
frank and direct, and above falsehood.  Our politics fall into bad
hands, and churchmen and men of refinement, it seems agreed, are not
fit persons to send to Congress.  Politics is a deleterious
profession, like some poisonous handicrafts.  Men in power have no
opinions, but may be had cheap for any opinion, for any purpose, --
and if it be only a question between the most civil and the most
forcible, I lean to the last.  These Hoosiers and Suckers are really
better than the snivelling opposition.  Their wrath is at least of a
bold and manly cast.  They see, against the unanimous declarations of
the people, how much crime the people will bear; they proceed from
step to step, and they have calculated but too justly upon their
Excellencies, the New England governors, and upon their Honors, the
New England legislators.  The messages of the governors and the
resolutions of the legislatures, are a proverb for expressing a sham
virtuous indignation, which, in the course of events, is sure to be
belied.

        In trade, also, this energy usually carries a trace of
ferocity.  Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make
their executive officers out of saints.  The communities hitherto
founded by Socialists, -- the Jesuits, the Port-Royalists, the
American communities at New Harmony, at Brook Farm, at Zoar, are only
possible, by installing Judas as steward.  The rest of the offices
may be filled by good burgesses.  The pious and charitable proprietor
has a foreman not quite so pious and charitable.  The most amiable of
country gentlemen has a certain pleasure in the teeth of the bull-dog
which guards his orchard.  Of the Shaker society, it was formerly a
sort of proverb in the country, that they always sent the devil to
market.  And in representations of the Deity, painting, poetry, and
popular religion have ever drawn the wrath from Hell.  It is an
esoteric doctrine of society, that a little wickedness is good to
make muscle; as if conscience were not good for hands and legs, as if
poor decayed formalists of law and order cannot run like wild goats,
wolves, and conies; that, as there is a use in medicine for poisons,
so the world cannot move without rogues; that public spirit and the
ready hand are as well found among the malignants.  'Tis not very
rare, the coincidence of sharp private and political practice, with
public spirit, and good neighborhood.

        I knew a burly Boniface who for many years kept a public-house
in one of our rural capitals.  He was a knave whom the town could ill
spare.  He was a social, vascular creature, grasping and selfish.
There was no crime which he did not or could not commit.  But he made
good friends of the selectmen, served them with his best chop, when
they supped at his house, and also with his honor the Judge, he was
very cordial, grasping his hand.  He introduced all the fiends, male
and female, into the town, and united in his person the functions of
bully, incendiary, swindler, barkeeper, and burglar.  He girdled the
trees, and cut off the horses' tails of the temperance people, in the
night.  He led the `rummies' and radicals in town-meeting with a
speech.  Meantime, he was civil, fat, and easy, in his house, and
precisely the most public-spirited citizen.  He was active in getting
the roads repaired and planted with shade-trees; he subscribed for
the fountains, the gas, and the telegraph; he introduced the new
horse-rake, the new scraper, the baby-jumper, and what not, that
Connecticut sends to the admiring citizens.  He did this the easier,
that the peddler stopped at his house, and paid his keeping, by
setting up his new trap on the landlord's premises.

        Whilst thus the energy for originating and executing work,
deforms itself by excess, and so our axe chops off our own fingers,
-- this evil is not without remedy.  All the elements whose aid man
calls in, will sometimes become his masters, especially those of most
subtle force.  Shall he, then, renounce steam, fire, and electricity,
or, shall he learn to deal with them?  The rule for this whole class
of agencies is, -- all _plus_ is good; only put it in the right
place.

        Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts,
herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels, and play whist; cannot
satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture, or the Boston
Athenaeum.  They pine for adventure, and must go to Pike's Peak; had
rather die by the hatchet of a Pawnee, than sit all day and every day
at a counting-room desk.  They are made for war, for the sea, for
mining, hunting, and clearing; for hair-breadth adventures, huge
risks, and the joy of eventful living.  Some men cannot endure an
hour of calm at sea.  I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a
Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain
his joy; "Blow!" he cried, "me do tell you, blow!" Their friends and
governors must see that some vent for their explosive complexion is
provided.  The roisters who are destined for infamy at home, if sent
to Mexico, will "cover you with glory," and come back heroes and
generals.  There are Oregons, Californias, and Exploring Expeditions
enough appertaining to America, to find them in files to gnaw, and in
crocodiles to eat.  The young English are fine animals, full of
blood, and when they have no wars to breathe their riotous valors in,
they seek for travels as dangerous as war, diving into Maelstroms;
swimming Hellesponts; wading up the snowy Himmaleh; hunting lion,
rhinoceros, elephant, in South Africa; gypsying with Borrow in Spain
and Algiers; riding alligators in South America with Waterton;
utilizing Bedouin, Sheik, and Pacha, with Layard; yachting among the
icebergs of Lancaster Sound; peeping into craters on the equator; or
running on the creases of Malays in Borneo.

        The excess of virility has the same importance in general
history, as in private and industrial life.  Strong race or strong
individual rests at last on natural forces, which are best in the
savage, who, like the beasts around him, is still in reception of the
milk from the teats of Nature.  Cut off the connection between any of
our works, and this aboriginal source, and the work is shallow.  The
people lean on this, and the mob is not quite so bad an argument as
we sometimes say, for it has this good side.  "March without the
people," said a French deputy from the tribune, "and you march into
night: their instincts are a finger-pointing of Providence, always
turned toward real benefit.  But when you espouse an Orleans party,
or a Bourbon, or a Montalembert party, or any other but an organic
party, though you mean well, you have a personality instead of a
principle, which will inevitably drag you into a corner."

        The best anecdotes of this force are to be had from savage
life, in explorers, soldiers, and buccaneers.  But who cares for
fallings-out of assassins, and fights of bears, or grindings of
icebergs?  Physical force has no value, where there is nothing else.
Snow in snow-banks, fire in volcanoes and solfataras is cheap.  The
luxury of ice is in tropical countries, and midsummer days.  The
luxury of fire is, to have a little on our hearth: and of
electricity, not volleys of the charged cloud, but the manageable
stream on the battery-wires.  So of spirit, or energy; the rests or
remains of it in the civil and moral man, are worth all the cannibals
in the Pacific.

        In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just
ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed
on his opening sense of beauty: -- and you have Pericles and Phidias,
-- not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility.  Everything good
in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the
swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their
astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.

        The triumphs of peace have been in some proximity to war.
Whilst the hand was still familiar with the sword-hilt, whilst the
habits of the camp were still visible in the port and complexion of
the gentleman, his intellectual power culminated: the compression and
tension of these stern conditions is a training for the finest and
softest arts, and can rarely be compensated in tranquil times, except
by some analogous vigor drawn from occupations as hardy as war.

        We say that success is constitutional; depends on a _plus_
condition of mind and body, on power of work, on courage; that it is
of main efficacy in carrying on the world, and, though rarely found
in the right state for an article of commerce, but oftener in the
supersaturate or excess, which makes it dangerous and destructive,
yet it cannot be spared, and must be had in that form, and absorbents
provided to take off its edge.

        The affirmative class monopolize the homage of mankind.  They
originate and execute all the great feats.  What a force was coiled
up in the skull of Napoleon!  Of the sixty thousand men making his
army at Eylau, it seems some thirty thousand were thieves and
burglars.  The men whom, in peaceful communities, we hold if we can,
with iron at their legs, in prisons, under the muskets of sentinels,
this man dealt with, hand to hand, dragged them to their duty, and
won his victories by their bayonets.

        This aboriginal might gives a surprising pleasure when it
appears under conditions of supreme refinement, as in the proficients
in high art.  When Michel Angelo was forced to paint the Sistine
Chapel in fresco, of which art he knew nothing, he went down into the
Pope's gardens behind the Vatican, and with a shovel dug out ochres,
red and yellow, mixed them with glue and water with his own hands,
and having, after many trials, at last suited himself, climbed his
ladders, and painted away, week after week, month after month, the
sibyls and prophets.  He surpassed his successors in rough vigor, as
much as in purity of intellect and refinement.  He was not crushed by
his one picture left unfinished at last.  Michel was wont to draw his
figures first in skeleton, then to clothe them with flesh, and lastly
to drape them.  "Ah!" said a brave painter to me, thinking on these
things, "if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of
working.  There is no way to success in our art, but to take off your
coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day
and every day."

        Success goes thus invariably with a certain _plus_ or positive
power: an ounce of power must balance an ounce of weight.  And,
though a man cannot return into his mother's womb, and be born with
new amounts of vivacity, yet there are two economies, which are the
best _succedanea_ which the case admits.  The first is, the stopping
off decisively our miscellaneous activity, and concentrating our
force on one or a few points; as the gardener, by severe pruning,
forces the sap of the tree into one or two vigorous limbs, instead of
suffering it to spindle into a sheaf of twigs.

 
        "Enlarge not thy destiny," said the oracle: "endeavor not to do
more than is given thee in charge." The one prudence in life is
concentration; the one evil is dissipation: and it makes no
difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine; property and
its cares, friends, and a social habit, or politics, or music, or
feasting.  Everything is good which takes away one plaything and
delusion more, and drives us home to add one stroke of faithful work.
Friends, books, pictures, lower duties, talents, flatteries, hopes,
-- all are distractions which cause oscillations in our giddy
balloon, and make a good poise and a straight course impossible.  You
must elect your work; you shall take what your brain can, and drop
all the rest.  Only so, can that amount of vital force accumulate,
which can make the step from knowing to doing.  No matter how much
faculty of idle seeing a man has, the step from knowing to doing is
rarely taken.  'Tis a step out of a chalk circle of imbecility into
fruitfulness.  Many an artist lacking this, lacks all: he sees the
masculine Angelo or Cellini with despair.  He, too, is up to Nature
and the First Cause in his thought.  But the spasm to collect and
swing his whole being into one act, he has not.  The poet Campbell
said, that "a man accustomed to work was equal to any achievement he
resolved on, and, that, for himself, necessity not inspiration was
the prompter of his muse."

        Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in
trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.  One of the high
anecdotes of the world is the reply of Newton to the inquiry, "how he
had been able to achieve his discoveries?" -- "By always intending my
mind." Or if you will have a text from politics, take this from
Plutarch: "There was, in the whole city, but one street in which
Pericles was ever seen, the street which led to the market-place and
the council house.  He declined all invitations to banquets, and all
gay assemblies and company.  During the whole period of his
administration, he never dined at the table of a friend." Or if we
seek an example from trade, -- "I hope," said a good man to
Rothyschild, "your children are not too fond of money and business: I
am sure you would not wish that." -- "I am sure I should wish that: I
wish them to give mind, soul, heart, and body to business, -- that is
the way to be happy.  It requires a great deal of boldness and a
great deal of caution, to make a great fortune, and when you have got
it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it.  If I were to
listen to all the projects proposed to me, I should ruin myself very
soon.  Stick to one business, young man.  Stick to your brewery, (he
said this to young Buxton,) and you will be the great brewer of
London.  Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and
you will soon be in the Gazette."

        Many men are knowing, many are apprehensive and tenacious, but
they do not rush to a decision.  But in our flowing affairs a
decision must be made, -- the best, if you can; but any is better
than none.  There are twenty ways of going to a point, and one is the
shortest; but set out at once on one.  A man who has that presence of
mind which can bring to him on the instant all he knows, is worth for
action a dozen men who know as much, but can only bring it to light
slowly.  The good Speaker in the House is not the man who knows the
theory of parliamentary tactics, but the man who decides off-hand.
The good judge is not he who does hair-splitting justice to every
allegation, but who, aiming at substantial justice, rules something
intelligible for the guidance of suitors.  The good lawyer is not the
man who has an eye to every side and angle of contingency, and
qualifies all his qualifications, but who throws himself on your part
so heartily, that he can get you out of a scrape.  Dr. Johnson said,
in one of his flowing sentences, "Miserable beyond all names of
wretchedness is that unhappy pair, who are doomed to reduce
beforehand to the principles of abstract reason all the details of
each domestic day.  There are cases where little can be said, and
much must be done."

        The second substitute for temperament is drill, the power of
use and routine.  The hack is a better roadster than the Arab barb.
In chemistry, the galvanic stream, slow, but continuous, is equal in
power to the electric spark, and is, in our arts, a better agent.  So
in human action, against the spasm of energy, we offset the
continuity of drill.  We spread the same amount of force over much
time, instead of condensing it into a moment.  'Tis the same ounce of
gold here in a ball, and there in a leaf.  At West Point, Col.
Buford, the chief engineer, pounded with a hammer on the trunnions of
a cannon, until he broke them off.  He fired a piece of ordnance some
hundred times in swift succession, until it burst.  Now which stroke
broke the trunnion?  Every stroke.  Which blast burst the piece?
Every blast.  _"Diligence passe sens,"_ Henry VIII.  was wont to say,
or, great is drill.  John Kemble said, that the worst provincial
company of actors would go through a play better than the best
amateur company.  Basil Hall likes to show that the worst regular
troops will beat the best volunteers.  Practice is nine tenths.  A
course of mobs is good practice for orators.  All the great speakers
were bad speakers at first.  Stumping it through England for seven
years, made Cobden a consummate debater.  Stumping it through New
England for twice seven, trained Wendell Phillips.  The way to learn
German, is, to read the same dozen pages over and over a hundred
times, till you know every word and particle in them, and can
pronounce and repeat them by heart.  No genius can recite a ballad at
first reading, so well as mediocrity can at the fifteenth or
twentieth readying.  The rule for hospitality and Irish `help,' is,
to have the same dinner every day throughout the year.  At last, Mrs.
O'Shaughnessy learns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve
it, and the guests are well served.  A humorous friend of mine
thinks, that the reason why Nature is so perfect in her art, and gets
up such inconceivably fine sunsets, is, that she has learned how, at
last, by dint of doing the same thing so very often.  Cannot one
converse better on a topic on which he has experience, than on one
which is new?  Men whose opinion is valued on 'Change, are only such
as have a special experience, and off that ground their opinion is
not valuable.  "More are made good by exercitation, than by nature,"
said Democritus.  The friction in nature is so enormous that we
cannot spare any power.  It is not question to express our thought,
to elect our way, but to overcome resistances of the medium and
material in everything we do.  Hence the use of drill, and the
worthlessness of amateurs to cope with practitioners.  Six hours
every day at the piano, only to give facility of touch; six hours a
day at painting, only to give command of the odious materials, oil,
ochres, and brushes.  The masters say, that they know a master in
music, only by seeing the pose of the hands on the keys; -- so
difficult and vital an act is the command of the instrument.  To have
learned the use of the tools, by thousands of manipulations; to have
learned the arts of reckoning, by endless adding and dividing, is the
power of the mechanic and the clerk.

        I remarked in England, in confirmation of a frequent experience
at home, that, in literary circles, the men of trust and
consideration, bookmakers, editors, university deans and professors,
bishops, too, were by no means men of the largest literary talent,
but usually of a low and ordinary intellectuality, with a sort of
mercantile activity and working talent.  Indifferent hacks and
mediocrities tower, by pushing their forces to a lucrative point, or
by working power, over multitudes of superior men, in Old as in New
England.

        I have not forgotten that there are sublime considerations
which limit the value of talent and superficial success.  We can
easily overpraise the vulgar hero.  There are sources on which we
have not drawn.  I know what I abstain from.  I adjourn what I have
to say on this topic to the chapters on Culture and Worship.  But
this force or spirit, being the means relied on by Nature for
bringing the work of the day about, -- as far as we attach importance
to household life, and the prizes of the world, we must respect that.
And I hold, that an economy may be applied to it; it is as much a
subject of exact law and arithmetic as fluids and gases are; it may
be husbanded, or wasted; every man is efficient only as he is a
container or vessel of this force, and never was any signal act or
achievement in history, but by this expenditure.  This is not gold,
but the gold-maker; not the fame, but the exploit.

        If these forces and this husbandry are within reach of our
will, and the laws of them can be read, we infer that all success,
and all conceivable benefit for man, is also, first or last, within
his reach, and has its own sublime economies by which it may be
attained.  The world is mathematical, and has no casualty, in all its
vast and flowing curve.  Success has no more eccentricity, than the
gingham and muslin we weave in our mills.  I know no more affecting
lesson to our busy, plotting New England brains, than to go into one
of the factories with which we have lined all the watercourses in the
States.  A man hardly knows how much he is a machine, until he begins
to make telegraph, loom, press, and locomotive, in his own image.
But in these, he is forced to leave out his follies and hindrances,
so that when we go to the mill, the machine is more moral than we.
Let a man dare go to a loom, and see if he be equal to it.  Let
machine confront machine, and see how they come out.  The world-mill
is more complex than the calico-mill, and the architect stooped less.
In the gingham-mill, a broken thread or a shred spoils the web
through a piece of a hundred yards, and is traced back to the girl
that wove it, and lessens her wages.  The stockholder, on being shown
this, rubs his hands with delight.  Are you so cunning, Mr.
Profitloss, and do you expect to swindle your master and employer, in
the web you weave?  A day is a more magnificent cloth than any
muslin, the mechanism that makes it is infinitely cunninger, and you
shall not conceal the sleezy, fraudulent, rotten hours you have
slipped into the piece, nor fear that any honest thread, or
straighter steel, or more inflexible shaft, will not testify in the
web.

 
 
 
        III
 
        WEALTH
 
 
        Who shall tell what did befall,
        Far away in time, when once,
        Over the lifeless ball,
        Hung idle stars and suns?
        What god the element obeyed?
        Wings of what wind the lichen bore,
        Wafting the puny seeds of power,
        Which, lodged in rock, the rock abrade?
        And well the primal pioneer
        Knew the strong task to it assigned
        Patient through Heaven's enormous year
        To build in matter home for mind.
        From air the creeping centuries drew
        The matted thicket low and wide,
        This must the leaves of ages strew
        The granite slab to clothe and hide,
        Ere wheat can wave its golden pride.
        What smiths, and in what furnace, rolled
        (In dizzy aeons dim and mute
        The reeling brain can ill compute)
        Copper and iron, lead, and gold?
        What oldest star the fame can save
        Of races perishing to pave
        The planet with a floor of lime?
        Dust is their pyramid and mole:
        Who saw what ferns and palms were pressed
        Under the tumbling mountain's breast, |P988
        In the safe herbal of the coal?
        But when the quarried means were piled,
        All is waste and worthless, till
        Arrives the wise selecting will,
        And, out of slime and chaos, Wit
        Draws the threads of fair and fit.
        Then temples rose, and towns, and marts,
        The shop of toil, the hall of arts;
        Then flew the sail across the seas
        To feed the North from tropic trees;
        The storm-wind wove, the torrent span,
        Where they were bid the rivers ran;
        New slaves fulfilled the poet's dream,
        Galvanic wire, strong-shouldered steam.
        Then docks were built, and crops were stored,
        And ingots added to the hoard.
        But, though light-headed man forget,
        Remembering Matter pays her debt:
        Still, through her motes and masses, draw
        Electric thrills and ties of Law,
        Which bind the strengths of Nature wild
        To the conscience of a child.

 
        _Wealth_
 
        As soon as a stranger is introduced into any compations which
all wish to have answered, is, How does that man get his living?  And
with reason.  He is no whole man until he knows how to earn a
blameless livelihood.  Society is barbarous, until every industrious
man can get his living without dishonest customs.

        Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer.  He fails
to make his place good in the world, unless he not only pays his
debt, but also adds something to the common wealth.  Nor can he do
justice to his genius, without making some larger demand on the world
than a bare subsistence.  He is by constitution expensive, and needs
to be rich.

        Wealth has its source in applications of the mind to nature,
from the rudest strokes of spade and axe, up to the last secrets of
art.  Intimate ties subsist between thought and all production;
because a better order is equivalent to vast amounts of brute labor.
The forces and the resistances are Nature's, but the mind acts in
bringing things from where they abound to where they are wanted; in
wise combining; in directing the practice of the useful arts, and in
the creation of finer values, by fine art, by eloquence, by song, or
the reproductions of memory.  Wealth is in applications of mind to
nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much
less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the
right spot.  One man has stronger arms, or longer legs; another sees
by the course of streams, and growth of markets, where land will be
wanted, makes a clearing to the river, goes to sleep, wakes up rich.
Steam is no stronger now, than it was a hundred years ago; but is put
to better use.  A clever fellow was acquainted with the expansive
force of steam; he also saw the wealth of wheat and grass rotting in
Michigan.  Then he cunningly screws on the steam-pipe to the
wheat-crop.  Puff now, O Steam!  The steam puffs and expands as
before, but this time it is dragging all Michigan at its back to
hungry New York and hungry England.  Coal lay in ledges under the
ground since the Flood, until a laborer with pick and windlass brings
it to the surface.  We may well call it black diamonds.  Every basket
is power and civilization.  For coal is a portable climate.  It
carries the heat of the tropics to Labrador and the polar circle: and
it is the means of transporting itself whithersoever it is wanted.
Watt and Stephenson whispered in the ear of mankind their secret,
that _a half-ounce of coal will draw two tons a mile_, and coal
carries coal, by rail and by boat, to make Canada as warm as
Calcutta, and with its comfort brings its industrial power.

        When the farmer's peaches are taken from under the tree, and
carried into town, they have a new look, and a hundredfold value over
the fruit which grew on the same bough, and lies fulsomely on the
ground.  The craft of the merchant is this bringing a thing from
where it abounds, to where it is costly.

        Wealth begins in a tight roof that keeps the rain and wind out;
in a good pump that yields you plenty of sweet water; in two suits of
clothes, so to change your dress when you are wet; in dry sticks to
burn; in a good double-wick lamp; and three meals; in a horse, or a
locomotive, to cross the land; in a boat to cross the sea; in tools
to work with; in books to read; and so, in giving, on all sides, by
tools and auxiliaries, the greatest possible extension to our powers,
as if it added feet, and hands, and eyes, and blood, length to the
day, and knowledge, and good-will.

        Wealth begins with these articles of necessity.  And here we
must recite the iron law which Nature thunders in these northern
climates.  First, she requires that each man should feed himself.
If, happily, his fathers have left him no inheritance, he must go to
work, and by making his wants less, or his gains more, he must draw
himself out of that state of pain and insult in which she forces the
beggar to lie.  She gives him no rest until this is done: she
starves, taunts, and torments him, takes away warmth, laughter,
sleep, friends, and daylight, until he has fought his way to his own
loaf.  Then, less peremptorily, but still with sting enough, she
urges him to the acquisition of such things as belong to him.  Every
warehouse and shop-window, every fruit-tree, every thought of every
hour, opens a new want to him, which it concerns his power and
dignity to gratify.  It is of no use to argue the wants down: the
philosophers have laid the greatness of man in making his wants few;
but will a man content himself with a hut and a handful of dried
pease?  He is born to be rich.  He is thoroughly related; and is
tempted out by his appetites and fancies to the conquest of this and
that piece of nature, until he finds his well-being in the use of his
planet, and of more planets than his own.  Wealth requires, besides
the crust of bread and the roof, -- the freedom of the city, the
freedom of the earth, travelling, machinery, the benefits of science,
music, and fine arts, the best culture, and the best company.  He is
the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties.  He is the
richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the
greatest number of men, of men in distant countries, and in past
times.  The same correspondence that is between thirst in the
stomach, and water in the spring, exists between the whole of man and
the whole of nature.  The elements offer their service to him.  The
sea, washing the equator and the poles, offers its perilous aid, and
the power and empire that follow it, -- day by day to his craft and
audacity.  "Beware of me," it says, "but if you can hold me, I am the
key to all the lands." Fire offers, on its side, an equal power.
Fire, steam, lightning, gravity, ledges of rock, mines of iron, lead,
quicksilver, tin, and gold; forests of all woods; fruits of all
climates; animals of all habits; the powers of tillage; the fabrics
of his chemic laboratory; the webs of his loom; the masculine draught
of his locomotive, the talismans of the machine-shop; all grand and
subtile things, minerals, gases, ethers, passions, war, trade,
government, are his natural playmates, and, according to the
excellence of the machinery in each human being, is his attraction
for the instruments he is to employ.  The world is his tool-chest,
and he is successful, or his education is carried on just so far, as
is the marriage of his faculties with nature, or, the degree in which
he takes up things into himself.

        The strong race is strong on these terms.  The Saxons are the
merchants of the world; now, for a thousand years, the leading race,
and by nothing more than their quality of personal independence, and,
in its special modification, pecuniary independence.  No reliance for
bread and games on the government, no clanship, no patriarchal style
of living by the revenues of a chief, no marrying-on, -- no system of
clientship suits them; but every man must pay his scot.  The English
are prosperous and peaceable, with their habit of considering that
every man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he
do not maintain and improve his position in society.

        The subject of economy mixes itself with morals, inasmuch as it
is a peremptory point of virtue that a man's independence be secured.
Poverty demoralizes.  A man in debt is so far a slave; and
Wall-street thinks it easy for a _millionaire_ to be a man of his
word, a man of honor, but, that, in failing circumstances, no man can
be relied on to keep his integrity.  And when one observes in the
hotels and palaces of our Atlantic capitals, the habit of expense,
the riot of the senses, the absence of bonds, clanship,
fellow-feeling of any kind, he feels, that, when a man or a woman is
driven to the wall, the chances of integrity are frightfully
diminished, as if virtue were coming to be a luxury which few could
afford, or, as Burke said, "at a market almost too high for
humanity." He may fix his inventory of necessities and of enjoyments
on what scale he pleases, but if he wishes the power and privilege of
thought, the chalking out his own career, and having society on his
own terms, he must bring his wants within his proper power to
satisfy.

        The manly part is to do with might and main what you can do.
The world is full of fops who never did anything, and who have
persuaded beauties and men of genius to wear their fop livery, and
these will deliver the fop opinion, that it is not respectable to be
seen earning a living; that it is much more respectable to spend
without earning; and this doctrine of the snake will come also from
the elect sons of light; for wise men are not wise at all hours, and
will speak five times from their taste or their humor, to once from
their reason.  The brave workman, who might betray his feeling of it
in his manners, if he do not succumb in his practice, must replace
the grace or elegance forfeited, by the merit of the work done.  No
matter whether he make shoes, or statues, or laws.  It is the
privilege of any human work which is well done to invest the doer
with a certain haughtiness.  He can well afford not to conciliate,
whose faithful work will answer for him.  The mechanic at his bench
carries a quiet heart and assured manners, and deals on even terms
with men of any condition.  The artist has made his picture so true,
that it disconcerts criticism.  The statue is so beautiful, that it
contracts no stain from the market, but makes the market a silent
gallery for itself.  The case of the young lawyer was pitiful to
disgust, -- a paltry matter of buttons or tweezer-cases; but the
determined youth saw in it an aperture to insert his dangerous
wedges, made the insignificance of the thing forgotten, and gave fame
by his sense and energy to the name and affairs of the Tittleton
snuffbox factory.

        Society in large towns is babyish, and wealth is made a toy.
The life of pleasure is so ostentatious, that a shallow observer must
believe that this is the agreed best use of wealth, and, whatever is
pretended, it ends in cosseting.  But, if this were the main use of
surplus capital, it would bring us to barricades, burned towns, and
tomahawks, presently.  Men of sense esteem wealth to be the
assimilation of nature to themselves, the converting of the sap and
juices of the planet to the incarnation and nutriment of their
design.  Power is what they want, -- not candy; -- power to execute
their design, power to give legs and feet, form and actuality to
their thought, which, to a clear-sighted man, appears the end for
which the Universe exists, and all its resources might be well
applied.  Columbus thinks that the sphere is a problem for practical
navigation, as well as for closet geometry, and looks on all kings
and peoples as cowardly landsmen, until they dare fit him out.  Few
men on the planet have more truly belonged to it.  But he was forced
to leave much of his map blank.  His successors inherited his map,
and inherited his fury to complete it.

        So the men of the mine, telegraph, mill, map, and survey,-- the
monomaniacs, who talk up their project in marts, and offices, and
entreat men to subscribe: -- how did our factories get built? how did
North America get netted with iron rails, except by the importunity
of these orators, who dragged all the prudent men in?  Is party the
madness of many for the gain of a few?  This _speculative_ genius is
the madness of few for the gain of the world.  The projectors are
sacrificed, but the public is the gainer.  Each of these idealists,
working after his thought, would make it tyrannical, if he could.  He
is met and antagonized by other speculators, as hot as he.  The
equilibrium is preserved by these counteractions, as one tree keeps
down another in the forest, that it may not absorb all the sap in the
ground.  And the supply in nature of railroad presidents,
copper-miners, grand-junctioners, smoke-burners, fire-annihilators,
&c., is limited by the same law which keeps the proportion in the
supply of carbon, of alum, and of hydrogen.

        To be rich is to have a ticket of admission to the master-works
and chief men of each race.  It is to have the sea, by voyaging; to
visit the mountains, Niagara, the Nile, the desert, Rome, Paris,
Constantinople; to see galleries, libraries, arsenals, manufactories.
The reader of Humboldt's "Cosmos" follows the marches of a man whose
eyes, ears, and mind are armed by all the science, arts, and
implements which mankind have anywhere accumulated, and who is using
these to add to the stock.  So is it with Denon, Beckford, Belzoni,
Wilkinson, Layard, Kane, Lepsius, and Livingston.  "The rich man,"
says Saadi, "is everywhere expected and at home." The rich take up
something more of the world into man's life.  They include the
country as well as the town, the ocean-side, the White Hills, the Far
West, and the old European homesteads of man, in their notion of
available material.  The world is his, who has money to go over it.
He arrives at the sea-shore, and a sumptuous ship has floored and
carpeted for him the stormy Atlantic, and made it a luxurious hotel,
amid the horrors of tempests.  The Persians say, "'Tis the same to
him who wears a shoe, as if the whole earth were covered with
leather."

        Kings are said to have long arms, but every man should have
long arms, and should pluck his living, his instruments, his power,
and his knowing, from the sun, moon, and stars.  Is not then the
demand to be rich legitimate?  Yet, I have never seen a rich man.  I
have never seen a man as rich as all men ought to be, or, with an
adequate command of nature.  The pulpit and the press have many
commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth; but if men should take
these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the
moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in
the people, lest civilization should be undone.  Men are urged by
their ideas to acquire the command over nature.  Ages derive a
culture from the wealth of Roman Caesars, Leo Tenths, magnificent
Kings of France, Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Dukes of Devonshire,
Townleys, Vernons, and Peels, in England; or whatever great
proprietors.  It is the interest of all men, that there should be
Vaticans and Louvres full of noble works of art; British Museums, and
French Gardens of Plants, Philadelphia Academies of Natural History,
Bodleian, Ambrosian, Royal, Congressional Libraries.  It is the
interest of all that there should be Exploring Expeditions; Captain
Cooks to voyage round the world, Rosses, Franklins, Richardsons, and
Kanes, to find the magnetic and the geographic poles.  We are all
richer for the measurement of a degree of latitude on the earth's
surface.  Our navigation is safer for the chart.  How intimately our
knowledge of the system of the Universe rests on that!  -- and a true
economy in a state or an individual will forget its frugality in
behalf of claims like these.

        Whilst it is each man's interest, that, not only ease and
convenience of living, but also wealth or surplus product should
exist somewhere, it need not be in his hands.  Often it is very
undesirable to him.  Goethe said well, "nobody should be rich but
those who understand it." Some men are born to own, and can animate
all their possessions.  Others cannot: their owning is not graceful;
seems to be a compromise of their character: they seem to steal their
own dividends.  They should own who can administer; not they who
hoard and conceal; not they who, the greater proprietors they are,
are only the greater beggars, but they whose work carves out work for
more, opens a path for all.  For he is the rich man in whom the
people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor:
and how to give all access to the masterpieces of art and nature, is
the problem of civilization.  The socialism of our day has done good
service in setting men on thinking how certain civilizing benefits,
now only enjoyed by the opulent, can be enjoyed by all.  For example,
the providing to each man the means and apparatus of science, and of
the arts.  There are many articles good for occasional use, which few
men are able to own.  Every man wishes to see the ring of Saturn, the
satellites and belts of Jupiter and Mars; the mountains and craters
in the moon: yet how few can buy a telescope! and of those, scarcely
one would like the trouble of keeping it in order, and exhibiting it.
So of electrical and chemical apparatus, and many the like things.
Every man may have occasion to consult books which he does not care
to possess, such as cyclopaedias, dictionaries, tables, charts, maps,
and public documents: pictures also of birds, beasts, fishes, shells,
trees, flowers, whose names he desires to know.

        There is a refining influence from the arts of Design on a
prepared mind, which is as positive as that of music, and not to be
supplied from any other source.  But pictures, engravings, statues,
and casts, beside their first cost, entail expenses, as of galleries
and keepers for the exhibition; and the use which any man can make of
them is rare, and their value, too, is much enhanced by the numbers
of men who can share their enjoyment.  In the Greek cities, it was
reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work
of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.  I think
sometimes, -- could I only have music on my own terms; -- could I
live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the
ablution and inundation of musical waves, -- that were a bath and a
medicine.

        If properties of this kind were owned by states, towns, and
lyceums, they would draw the bonds of neighborhood closer.  A town
would exist to an intellectual purpose.  In Europe, where the feudal
forms secure the permanence of wealth in certain families, those
families buy and preserve these things, and lay them open to the
public.  But in America, where democratic institutions divide every
estate into small portions, after a few years, the public should step
into the place of these proprietors, and provide this culture and
inspiration for the citizen.

        Man was born to be rich, or, inevitably grows rich by the use
of his faculties; by the union of thought with nature.  Property is
an intellectual production.  The game requires coolness, right
reasoning, promptness, and patience in the players.  Cultivated labor
drives out brute labor.  An infinite number of shrewd men, in
infinite years, have arrived at certain best and shortest ways of
doing, and this accumulated skill in arts, cultures, harvestings,
curings, manufactures, navigations, exchanges, constitutes the worth
of our world to-day.

        Commerce is a game of skill, which every man cannot play, which
few men can play well.  The right merchant is one who has the just
average of faculties we call _common sense_; a man of a strong
affinity for facts, who makes up his decision on what he has seen.
He is thoroughly persuaded of the truths of arithmetic.  There is
always a reason, _in the man_, for his good or bad fortune, and so,
in making money.  Men talk as if there were some magic about this,
and believe in magic, in all parts of life.  He knows, that all goes
on the old road, pound for pound, cent for cent, -- for every effect
a perfect cause, -- and that good luck is another name for tenacity
of purpose.  He insures himself in every transaction, and likes small
and sure gains.  Probity and closeness to the facts are the basis,
but the masters of the art add a certain long arithmetic.  The
problem is, to combine many and remote operations, with the accuracy
and adherence to the facts, which is easy in near and small
transactions; so to arrive at gigantic results, without any
compromise of safety.  Napoleon was fond of telling the story of the
Marseilles banker, who said to his visitor, surprised at the contrast
between the splendor of the banker's chateau and hospitality, and the
meanness of the counting-room in which he had seen him, -- "Young
man, you are too young to understand how masses are formed, -- the
true and only power, -- whether composed of money, water, or men, it
is all alike, -- a mass is an immense centre of motion, but it must
be begun, it must be kept up:" -- and he might have added, that the
way in which it must be begun and kept up, is, by obedience to the
law of particles.

        Success consists in close appliance to the laws of the world,
and, since those laws are intellectual and moral, an intellectual and
moral obedience.  Political Economy is as good a book wherein to read
the life of man, and the ascendency of laws over all private and
hostile influences, as any Bible which has come down to us.

        Money is representative, and follows the nature and fortunes of
the owner.  The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral
changes.  The farmer is covetous of his dollar, and with reason.  It
is no waif to him.  He knows how many strokes of labor it represents.
His bones ache with the day's work that earned it.  He knows how much
land it represents; -- how much rain, frost, and sunshine.  He knows
that, in the dollar, he gives you so much discretion and patience so
much hoeing, and threshing.  Try to lift his dollar; you must lift
all that weight.  In the city, where money follows the skit of a pen,
or a lucky rise in exchange, it comes to be looked on as light.  I
wish the farmer held it dearer, and would spend it only for real
bread; force for force.

        The farmer's dollar is heavy, and the clerk's is light and
nimble; leaps out of his pocket; jumps on to cards and faro-tables:
but still more curious is its susceptibility to metaphysical changes.
It is the finest barometer of social storms, and announces
revolutions.

        Every step of civil advancement makes every man's dollar worth
more.  In California, the country where it grew, -- what would it
buy?  A few years since, it would buy a shanty, dysentery, hunger,
bad company, and crime.  There are wide countries, like Siberia,
where it would buy little else to-day, than some petty mitigation of
suffering.  In Rome, it will buy beauty and magnificence.  Forty
years ago, a dollar would not buy much in Boston.  Now it will buy a
great deal more in our old town, thanks to railroads, telegraphs,
steamers, and the contemporaneous growth of New York, and the whole
country.  Yet there are many goods appertaining to a capital city,
which are not yet purchasable here, no, not with a mountain of
dollars.  A dollar in Florida is not worth a dollar in Massachusetts.
A dollar is not value, but representative of value, and, at last, of
moral values.  A dollar is rated for the corn it will buy, or to
speak strictly, not for the corn or house-room, but for Athenian
corn, and Roman house-room, -- for the wit, probity, and power, which
we eat bread and dwell in houses to share and exert.  Wealth is
mental; wealth is moral.  The value of a dollar is, to buy just
things: a dollar goes on increasing in value with all the genius, and
all the virtue of the world.  A dollar in a university, is worth more
than a dollar in a jail; in a temperate, schooled, law-abiding
community, than in some sink of crime, where dice, knives, and
arsenic, are in constant play.

        The "Bank-Note Detector" is a useful publication.  But the
current dollar, silver or paper, is itself the detector of the right
and wrong where it circulates.  Is it not instantly enhanced by the
increase of equity?  If a trader refuses to sell his vote, or adheres
to some odious right, he makes so much more equity in Massachusetts;
and every acre in the State is more worth, in the hour of his action.
If you take out of State-street the ten honestest merchants, and put
in ten roguish persons, controlling the same amount of capital, --
the rates of insurance will indicate it; the soundness of banks will
show it: the highways will be less secure: the schools will feel it;
the children will bring home their little dose of the poison: the
judge will sit less firmly on the bench, and his decisions be less
upright; he has lost so much support and constraint, -- which all
need; and the pulpit will betray it, in a laxer rule of life.  An
apple-tree, if you take out every day for a number of days, a load of
loam, and put in a load of sand about its roots, -- will find it out.
An apple-tree is a stupid kind of creature, but if this treatment be
pursued for a short time, I think it would begin to mistrust
something.  And if you should take out of the powerful class engaged
in trade a hundred good men, and put in a hundred bad, or, what is
just the same thing, introduce a demoralizing institution, would not
the dollar, which is not much stupider than an apple-tree, presently
find it out?  The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by
society.  Every man who removes into this city, with any purchasable
talent or skill in him, gives to every man's labor in the city, a new
worth.  If a talent is anywhere born into the world, the community of
nations is enriched; and, much more, with a new degree of probity.
The expense of crime, one of the principal charges of every nation,
is so far stopped.  In Europe, crime is observed to increase or abate
with the price of bread.  If the Rothschilds at Paris do not accept
bills, the people at Manchester, at Paisley, at Birmingham, are
forced into the highway, and landlords are shot down in Ireland.  The
police records attest it.  The vibrations are presently felt in New
York, New Orleans, and Chicago.  Not much otherwise, the economical
power touches the masses through the political lords.  Rothschild
refuses the Russian loan, and there is peace, and the harvests are
saved.  He takes it, and there is war, and an agitation through a
large portion of mankind, with every hideous result, ending in
revolution, and a new order.

        Wealth brings with it its own checks and balances.  The basis
of political economy is non-interference.  The only safe rule is
found in the self-adjusting meter of demand and supply.  Do not
legislate.  Meddle, and you snap the sinews with your sumptuary laws.
Give no bounties: make equal laws: secure life and property, and you
need not give alms.  Open the doors of opportunity to talent and
virtue, and they will do themselves justice, and property will not be
in bad hands.  In a free and just commonwealth, property rushes from
the idle and imbecile, to the industrious, brave, and persevering.

        The laws of nature play through trade, as a toy-battery
exhibits the effects of electricity.  The level of the sea is not
more surely kept, than is the equilibrium of value in society, by the
demand and supply: and artifice or legislation punishes itself, by
reactions, gluts, and bankruptcies.  The sublime laws play
indifferently through atoms and galaxies.  Whoever knows what happens
in the getting and spending of a loaf of bread and a pint of beer;
that no wishing will change the rigorous limits of pints and penny
loaves; that, for all that is consumed, so much less remains in the
basket and pot; but what is gone out of these is not wasted, but well
spent, if it nourish his body, and enable him to finish his task; --
knows all of political economy that the budgets of empires can teach
him.  The interest of petty economy is this symbolization of the
great economy; the way in which a house, and a private man's methods,
tally with the solar system, and the laws of give and take,
throughout nature; and, however wary we are of the falsehoods and
petty tricks which we suicidally play off on each other, every man
has a certain satisfaction, whenever his dealing touches on the
inevitable facts; when he sees that things themselves dictate the
price, as they always tend to do, and, in large manufactures, are
seen to do.  Your paper is not fine or coarse enough, -- is too
heavy, or too thin.  The manufacturer says, he will furnish you with
just that thickness or thinness you want; the pattern is quite
indifferent to him; here is his schedule; -- any variety of paper, as
cheaper or dearer, with the prices annexed.  A pound of paper costs
so much, and you may have it made up in any pattern you fancy.

        There is in all our dealings a self-regulation that supersedes
chaffering.  You will rent a house, but must have it cheap.  The
owner can reduce the rent, but so he incapacitates himself from
making proper repairs, and the tenant gets not the house he would
have, but a worse one; besides, that a relation a little injurious is
established between land-lord and tenant.  You dismiss your laborer,
saying, "Patrick, I shall send for you as soon as I cannot do without
you." Patrick goes off contented, for he knows that the weeds will
grow with the potatoes, the vines must be planted, next week, and,
however unwilling you may be, the cantelopes, crook-necks, and
cucumbers will send for him.  Who but must wish that all labor and
value should stand on the same simple and surly market?  If it is the
best of its kind, it will.  We must have joiner, locksmith, planter,
priest, poet, doctor, cook, weaver, ostler; each in turn, through the
year.

        If a St. Michael's pear sells for a shilling, it costs a
shilling to raise it.  If, in Boston, the best securities offer
twelve _per cent_.  for money, they have just six _per cent_.  of
insecurity.  You may not see that the fine pear costs you a shilling,
but it costs the community so much.  The shilling represents the
number of enemies the pear has, and the amount of risk in ripening
it.  The price of coal shows the narrowness of the coal-field, and a
compulsory confinement of the miners to a certain district.  All
salaries are reckoned on contingent, as well as on actual services.
"If the wind were always southwest by west," said the skipper, "women
might take ships to sea." One might say, that all things are of one
price; that nothing is cheap or dear; and that the apparent
disparities that strike us, are only a shopman's trick of concealing
the damage in your bargain.  A youth coming into the city from his
native New Hampshire farm, with its hard fare still fresh in his
remembrance, boards at a first-class hotel, and believes he must
somehow have outwitted Dr. Franklin and Malthus, for luxuries are
cheap.  But he pays for the one convenience of a better dinner, by
the loss of some of the richest social and educational advantages.
He has lost what guards! what incentives!  He will perhaps find by
and by, that he left the Muses at the door of the hotel, and found
the Furies inside.  Money often costs too much, and power and
pleasure are not cheap.  The ancient poet said, "the gods sell all
things at a fair price."

        There is an example of the compensations in the commercial
history of this country.  When the European wars threw the
carrying-trade of the world, from 1800 to 1812, into American
bottoms, a seizure was now and then made of an American ship.  Of
course, the loss was serious to the owner, but the country was
indemnified; for we charged threepence a pound for carrying cotton,
sixpence for tobacco, and so on; which paid for the risk and loss,
and brought into the country an immense prosperity, early marriages,
private wealth, the building of cities, and of states: and, after the
war was over, we received compensation over and above, by treaty, for
all the seizures.  Well, the Americans grew rich and great.  But the
pay-day comes round.  Britain, France, and Germany, which our
extraordinary profits had impoverished, send out, attracted by the
fame of our advantages, first their thousands, then their millions,
of poor people, to share the crop.  At first, we employ them, and
increase our prosperity: but, in the artificial system of society and
of protected labor, which we also have adopted and enlarged, there
come presently checks and stoppages.  Then we refuse to employ these
poor men.  But they will not so be answered.  They go into the poor
rates, and, though we refuse wages, we must now pay the same amount
in the form of taxes.  Again, it turns out that the largest
proportion of crimes are committed by foreigners.  The cost of the
crime, and the expense of courts, and of prisons, we must bear, and
the standing army of preventive police we must pay.  The cost of
education of the posterity of this great colony, I will not compute.
But the gross amount of these costs will begin to pay back what we
thought was a net gain from our transatlantic customers of 1800.  It
is vain to refuse this payment.  We cannot get rid of these people,
and we cannot get rid of their will to be supported.  That has become
an inevitable element of our politics; and, for their votes, each of
the dominant parties courts and assists them to get it executed.
Moreover, we have to pay, not what would have contented them at home,
but what they have learned to think necessary here; so that opinion,
fancy, and all manner of moral considerations complicate the problem.

        There are a few measures of economy which will bear to be named
without disgust; for the subject is tender, and we may easily have
too much of it; and therein resembles the hideous animalcules of
which our bodies are built up, -- which, offensive in the particular,
yet compose valuable and effective masses.  Our nature and genius
force us to respect ends, whilst we use means.  We must use the
means, and yet, in our most accurate using, somehow screen and cloak
them, as we can only give them any beauty, by a reflection of the
glory of the end.  That is the good head, which serves the end, and
commands the means.  The rabble are corrupted by their means: the
means are too strong for them, and they desert their end.

        1. The first of these measures is that each man's expense must
proceed from his character.  As long as your genius buys, the
investment is safe, though you spend like a monarch.  Nature arms
each man with some faculty which enables him to do easily some feat
impossible to any other, and thus makes him necessary to society.
This native determination guides his labor and his spending.  He
wants an equipment of means and tools proper to his talent.  And to
save on this point, were to neutralize the special strength and
helpfulness of each mind.  Do your work, respecting the excellence of
the work, and not its acceptableness.  This is so much economy, that,
rightly read, it is the sum of economy.  Profligacy consists not in
spending years of time or chests of money, -- but in spending them
off the line of your career.  The crime which bankrupts men and
states, is, job-work; -- declining from your main design, to serve a
turn here or there.  Nothing is beneath you, if it is in the
direction of your life: nothing is great or desirable, if it is off
from that.  I think we are entitled here to draw a straight line, and
say, that society can never prosper, but must always be bankrupt,
until every man does that which he was created to do.

        Spend for your expense, and retrench the expense which is not
yours.  Allston, the painter, was wont to say, that he built a plain
house, and filled it with plain furniture, because he would hold out
no bribe to any to visit him, who had not similar tastes to his own.
We are sympathetic, and, like children, want everything we see.  But
it is a large stride to independence,-- when a man, in the discovery
of his proper talent, has sunk the necessity for false expenses.  As
the betrothed maiden, by one secure affection, is relieved from a
system of slaveries, -- the daily inculcated necessity of pleasing
all, -- so the man who has found what he can do, can spend on that,
and leave all other spending.  Montaigne said, "When he was a younger
brother, he went brave in dress and equipage, but afterward his
chateau and farms might answer for him." Let a man who belongs to the
class of nobles, those, namely, who have found out that they can do
something, relieve himself of all vague squandering on objects not
his.  Let the realist not mind appearances.  Let him delegate to
others the costly courtesies and decorations of social life.  The
virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also.  Thus, next
to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband.  A
good pride is, as I reckon it, worth from five hundred to fifteen
hundred a year.  Pride is handsome, economical: pride eradicates so
many vices, letting none subsist but itself, that it seems as if it
were a great gain to exchange vanity for pride.  Pride can go without
domestics, without fine clothes, can live in a house with two rooms,
can eat potato, purslain, beans, lyed corn, can work on the soil, can
travel afoot, can talk with poor men, or sit silent well-contented in
fine saloons.  But vanity costs money, labor, horses, men, women,
health, and peace, and is still nothing at last, a long way leading
nowhere.  -- Only one drawback; proud people are intolerably selfish,
and the vain are gentle and giving.

        Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for
painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad
husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not
fetter himself with duties which will embitter his days, and spoil
him for his proper work.  We had in this region, twenty years ago,
among our educated men, a sort of Arcadian fanaticism, a passionate
desire to go upon the land, and unite farming to intellectual
pursuits.  Many effected their purpose, and made the experiment, and
some became downright ploughmen; but all were cured of their faith
that scholarship and practical farming, (I mean, with one's own
hands,) could be united.

        With brow bent, with firm intent, the pale scholar leaves his
desk to draw a freer breath, and get a juster statement of his
thought, in the garden-walk.  He stoops to pull up a purslain, or a
dock, that is choking the young corn, and finds there are two: close
behind the last, is a third; he reaches out his hand to a fourth;
behind that, are four thousand and one.  He is heated and untuned,
and, by and by, wakes up from his idiot dream of chickweed and
red-root, to remember his morning thought, and to find, that, with
his adamantine purposes, he has been duped by a dandelion.  A garden
is like those pernicious machineries we read of, every month, in the
newspapers, which catch a man's coat-skirt or his hand, and draw in
his arm, his leg, and his whole body to irresistible destruction.  In
an evil hour he pulled down his wall, and added a field to his
homestead.  No land is bad, but land is worse.  If a man own land,
the land owns him.  Now let him leave home, if he dare.  Every tree
and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all
he has done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like duns,
when he would go out of his gate.  The devotion to these vines and
trees he finds poisonous.  Long free walks, a circuit of miles, free
his brain, and serve his body.  Long marches are no hardship to him.
He believes he composes easily on the hills.  But this pottering in a
few square yards of garden is dispiriting and drivelling.  The smell
of the plants has drugged him, and robbed him of energy.  He finds a
catalepsy in his bones.  He grows peevish and poor-spirited.  The
genius of reading and of gardening are antagonistic, like resinous
and vitreous electricity.  One is concentrative in sparks and shocks:
the other is diffuse strength; so that each disqualifies its workman
for the other's duties.

        An engraver whose hands must be of an exquisite delicacy of
stroke, should not lay stone walls.  Sir David Brewster gives exact
instructions for microscopic observation: -- "Lie down on your back,
and hold the single lens and object over your eye," &c. &c.  How much
more the seeker of abstract truth, who needs periods of isolation,
and rapt concentration, and almost a going out of the body to think!

        2. Spend after your genius, _and by system_.  Nature goes by
rule, not by sallies and saltations.  There must be system in the
economies.  Saving and unexpensiveness will not keep the most
pathetic family from ruin, nor will bigger incomes make free spending
safe.  The secret of success lies never in the amount of money, but
in the relation of income to outgo; as if, after expense has been
fixed at a certain point, then new and steady rills of income, though
never so small, being added, wealth begins.  But in ordinary, as
means increase, spending increases faster, so that, large incomes, in
England and elsewhere, are found not to help matters; -- the eating
quality of debt does not relax its voracity.  When the cholera is in
the potato, what is the use of planting larger crops?  In England,
the richest country in the universe, I was assured by shrewd
observers, that great lords and ladies had no more guineas to give
away than other people; that liberality with money is as rare, and as
immediately famous a virtue as it is here.  Want is a growing giant
whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover.  I remember in
Warwickshire, to have been shown a fair manor, still in the same name
as in Shakspeare's time.  The rent-roll, I was told, is some fourteen
thousand pounds a year: but, when the second son of the late
proprietor was born, the father was perplexed how to provide for him.
The eldest son must inherit the manor; what to do with this
supernumerary?  He was advised to breed him for the Church, and to
settle him in the rectorship, which was in the gift of the family;
which was done.  It is a general rule in that country, that bigger
incomes do not help anybody.  It is commonly observed, that a sudden
wealth, like a prize drawn in a lottery, or a large bequest to a poor
family, does not permanently enrich.  They have served no
apprenticeship to wealth, and, with the rapid wealth, come rapid
claims: which they do not know how to deny, and the treasure is
quickly dissipated.

        A system must be in every economy, or the best single
expedients are of no avail.  A farm is a good thing, when it begins
and ends with itself, and does not need a salary, or a shop, to eke
it out.  Thus, the cattle are a main link in the chain-ring.  If the
non-conformist or aesthetic farmer leaves out the cattle, and does
not also leave out the want which the cattle must supply, he must
fill the gap by begging or stealing.  When men now alive were born,
the farm yielded everything that was consumed on it.  The farm
yielded no money, and the farmer got on without.  If he fell sick,
his neighbors came in to his aid: each gave a day's work; or a half
day; or lent his yoke of oxen, or his horse, and kept his work even:
hoed his potatoes, mowed his hay, reaped his rye; well knowing that
no man could afford to hire labor, without selling his land.  In
autumn, a farmer could sell an ox or a hog, and get a little money to
pay taxes withal.  Now, the farmer buys almost all he consumes, --
tin-ware, cloth, sugar, tea, coffee, fish, coal, railroad-tickets,
and newspapers.

        A master in each art is required, because the practice is never
with still or dead subjects, but they change in your hands.  You
think farm-buildings and broad acres a solid property: but its value
is flowing like water.  It requires as much watching as if you were
decanting wine from a cask.  The farmer knows what to do with it,
stops every leak, turns all the streamlets to one reservoir, and
decants wine: but a blunderhead comes out of Cornhill, tries his
hand, and it all leaks away.  So is it with granite streets, or
timber townships, as with fruit or flowers.  Nor is any investment so
permanent, that it can be allowed to remain without incessant
watching, as the history of each attempt to lock up an inheritance
through two generations for an unborn inheritor may show.

        When Mr. Cockayne takes a cottage in the country, and will keep
his cow, he thinks a cow is a creature that is fed on hay, and gives
a pail of milk twice a day.  But the cow that he buys gives milk for
three months; then her bag dries up.  What to do with a dry cow? who
will buy her?  Perhaps he bought also a yoke of oxen to do his work;
but they get blown and lame.  What to do with blown and lame oxen?
The farmer fats his, after the spring-work is done, and kills them in
the fall.  But how can Cockayne, who has no pastures, and leaves his
cottage daily in the cars, at business hours, be pothered with
fatting and killing oxen?  He plants trees; but there must be crops,
to keep the trees in ploughed land.  What shall be the crops?  He
will have nothing to do with trees, but will have grass.  After a
year or two, the grass must be turned up and ploughed: now what
crops?  Credulous Cockayne!

        3. Help comes in the custom of the country, and the rule of
_Impera parendo_.  The rule is not to dictate, nor to insist on
carrying out each of your schemes by ignorant wilfulness, but to
learn practically the secret spoken from all nature, that things
themselves refuse to be mismanaged, and will show to the watchful
their own law.  Nobody need stir hand or foot.  The custom of the
country will do it all.  I know not how to build or to plant; neither
how to buy wood, nor what to do with the house-lot, the field, or the
wood-lot, when bought.  Never fear: it is all settled how it shall
be, long beforehand, in the custom of the country, whether to sand,
or whether to clay it, when to plough, and how to dress, whether to
grass, or to corn; and you cannot help or hinder it.  Nature has her
own best mode of doing each thing, and she has somewhere told it
plainly, if we will keep our eyes and ears open.  If not, she will
not be slow in undeceiving us, when we prefer our own way to hers.
How often we must remember the art of the surgeon, which, in
replacing the broken bone, contents itself with releasing the parts
from false position; they fly into place by the action of the
muscles.  On this art of nature all our arts rely.

        Of the two eminent engineers in the recent construction of
railways in England, Mr. Brunel went straight from terminus to
terminus, through mountains, over streams, crossing highways, cutting
ducal estates in two, and shooting through this man's cellar, and
that man's attic window, and so arriving at his end, at great
pleasure to geometers, but with cost to his company.  Mr. Stephenson,
on the contrary, believing that the river knows the way, followed his
valley, as implicitly as our Western Railroad follows the Westfield
River, and turned out to be the safest and cheapest engineer.  We say
the cows laid out Boston.  Well, there are worse surveyors.  Every
pedestrian in our pastures has frequent occasion to thank the cows
for cutting the best path through the thicket, and over the hills:
and travellers and Indians know the value of a buffalo-trail, which
is sure to be the easiest possible pass through the ridge.

        When a citizen, fresh from Dock-square, or Milk-street, comes
out and buys land in the country, his first thought is to a fine
outlook from his windows: his library must command a western view: a
sunset every day, bathing the shoulder of Blue Hills, Wachusett, and
the peaks of Monadnoc and Uncanoonuc.  What, thirty acres, and all
this magnificence for fifteen hundred dollars!  It would be cheap at
fifty thousand.  He proceeds at once, his eyes dim with tears of joy,
to fix the spot for his corner-stone.  But the man who is to level
the ground, thinks it will take many hundred loads of gravel to fill
the hollow to the road.  The stone-mason who should build the well
thinks he shall have to dig forty feet: the baker doubts he shall
never like to drive up to the door: the practical neighbor cavils at
the position of the barn; and the citizen comes to know that his
predecessor the farmer built the house in the right spot for the sun
and wind, the spring, and water-drainage, and the convenience to the
pasture, the garden, the field, and the road.  So Dock-square yields
the point, and things have their own way.  Use has made the farmer
wise, and the foolish citizen learns to take his counsel.  From step
to step he comes at last to surrender at discretion.  The farmer
affects to take his orders; but the citizen says, You may ask me as
often as you will, and in what ingenious forms, for an opinion
concerning the mode of building my wall, or sinking my well, or
laying out my acre, but the ball will rebound to you.  These are
matters on which I neither know, nor need to know anything.  These
are questions which you and not I shall answer.

        Not less, within doors, a system settles itself paramount and
tyrannical over master and mistress, servant and child, cousin and
acquaintance.  'Tis in vain that genius or virtue or energy of
character strive and cry against it.  This is fate.  And 'tis very
well that the poor husband reads in a book of a new way of living,
and resolves to adopt it at home: let him go home and try it, if he
dare.

        4. Another point of economy is to look for seed of the same
kind as you sow: and not to hope to buy one kind with another kind.
Friendship buys friendship; justice, justice; military merit,
military success.  Good husbandry finds wife, children, and
household.  The good merchant large gains, ships, stocks, and money.
The good poet fame, and literary credit; but not either, the other.
Yet there is commonly a confusion of expectations on these points.
Hotspur lives for the moment; praises himself for it; and despises
Furlong, that he does not.  Hotspur, of course, is poor; and Furlong
a good provider.  The odd circumstance is, that Hotspur thinks it a
superiority in himself, this improvidence, which ought to be rewarded
with Furlong's lands.

        I have not at all completed my design.  But we must not leave
the topic, without casting one glance into the interior recesses.  It
is a doctrine of philosophy, that man is a being of degrees; that
there is nothing in the world, which is not repeated in his body; his
body being a sort of miniature or summary of the world: then that
there is nothing in his body, which is not repeated as in a celestial
sphere in his mind: then, there is nothing in his brain, which is not
repeated in a higher sphere, in his moral system.

        5. Now these things are so in Nature.  All things ascend, and
the royal rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or,
whatever we do must always have a higher aim.  Thus it is a maxim,
that money is another kind of blood.  _Pecunia alter sanguis_: or,
the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of
regimen analogous to his bodily circulations.  So there is no maxim
of the merchant, _e. g._, "Best use of money is to pay debts;" "Every
business by itself;" "Best time is present time;" "The right
investment is in tools of your trade;" or the like, which does not
admit of an extended sense.  The counting-room maxims liberally
expounded are laws of the Universe.  The merchant's economy is a
coarse symbol of the soul's economy.  It is, to spend for power, and
not for pleasure.  It is to invest income; that is to say, to take up
particulars into generals; days into integral eras, -- literary,
emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its
investment.  The merchant has but one rule, _absorb and invest_: he
is to be capitalist: the scraps and filings must be gathered back
into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings
must not go to increase expense, but to capital again.  Well, the man
must be capitalist.  Will he spend his income, or will he invest?
His body and every organ is under the same law.  His body is a jar,
in which the liquor of life is stored.  Will he spend for pleasure?
The way to ruin is short and facile.  Will he not spend, but hoard
for power?  It passes through the sacred fermentations, by that law
of Nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily
vigor becomes mental and moral vigor.  The bread he eats is first
strength and animal spirits: it becomes, in higher laboratories,
imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and
endurance.  This is the right compound interest; this is capital
doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power.

        The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to
invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in
spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence.  Nor is
the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal
sensation, nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures, he
knows himself by the actual experience of higher good, to be already
on the way to the highest.

 
 
        IV
 
        CULTURE
 
        Can rules or tutors educate
        The semigod whom we await?
        He must be musical,
        Tremulous, impressional,
        Alive to gentle influence
        Of landscape and of sky,
        And tender to the spirit-touch
        Of man's or maiden's eye:
        But, to his native centre fast,
        Shall into Future fuse the Past,
        And the world's flowing fates in
        his own mould recast.
 
 
        _Culture_

        The word of ambition at the present day is Culture.  Whilst all
the world is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power,
culture corrects the theory of success.  A man is the prisoner of his
power.  A topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a
disputant; skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar.
Culture reduces these inflammations by invoking the aid of other
powers against the dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of
powers.  It watches success.  For performance, Nature has no mercy,
and sacrifices the performer to get it done; makes a dropsy or a
tympany of him.  If she wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of
arms and legs, and any excess of power in one part is usually paid
for at once by some defect in a contiguous part.

        Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that
Nature usually in the instances where a marked man is sent into the
world, overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his
working power.  It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a
man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his
performances.  If she creates a policeman like Fouche, he is made up
of suspicions and of plots to circumvent them.  "The air," said
Fouche, "is full of poniards." The physician Sanctorius spent his
life in a pair of scales, weighing his food.  Lord Coke valued
Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale illustrates the
statute _Hen. V. Chap. 4,_ against alchemy.  I saw a man who believed
the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived from the
devotion to musical concerts.  A freemason, not long since, set out
to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success
of General Washington, was, the aid he derived from the freemasons.

        But worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured
individualism, by giving the private person a high conceit of his
weight in the system.  The pest of society is egotists.  There are
dull and bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists.  'Tis
a disease that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions.  In the
distemper known to physicians as _chorea_, the patient sometimes
turns round, and continues to spin slowly on one spot.  Is egotism a
metaphysical varioloid of this malady?  The man runs round a ring
formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses
relation to the world.  It is a tendency in all minds.  One of its
annoying forms, is a craving for sympathy.  The sufferers parade
their miseries, tear the lint from their bruises, reveal their
indictable crimes, that you may pity them.  They like sickness,
because physical pain will extort some show of interest from the
bystanders, as we have seen children, who, finding themselves of no
account when grown people come in, will cough till they choke, to
draw attention.

        This distemper is the scourge of talent, -- of artists,
inventors, and philosophers.  Eminent spiritualists shall have an
incapacity of putting their act or word aloof from them, and seeing
it bravely for the nothing it is.  Beware of the man who says, "I am
on the eve of a revelation." It is speedily punished, inasmuch as
this habit invites men to humor it, and by treating the patient
tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower selfism, and exclude him from
the great world of God's cheerful fallible men and women.  Let us
rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable.  Religious literature
has eminent examples, and if we run over our private list of poets,
critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we shall find them
infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we ought to have
tapped.

        This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons,
that we must infer some strong necessity in nature which it
subserves; such as we see in the sexual attraction.  The preservation
of the species was a point of such necessity, that Nature has secured
it at all hazards by immensely overloading the passion, at the risk
of perpetual crime and disorder.  So egotism has its root in the
cardinal necessity by which each individual persists to be what he
is.

        This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture,
but is the basis of it.  Every valuable nature is there in its own
right, and the student we speak to must have a motherwit invincible
by his culture, which uses all books, arts, facilities, and
elegancies of intercourse, but is never subdued and lost in them.  He
only is a well-made man who has a good determination.  And the end of
culture is not to destroy this, God forbid! but to train away all
impediment and mixture, and leave nothing but pure power.  Our
student must have a style and determination, and be a master in his
own specialty.  But, having this, he must put it behind him.  He must
have a catholicity, a power to see with a free and disengaged look
every object.  Yet is this private interest and self so overcharged,
that, if a man seeks a companion who can look at objects for their
own sake, and without affection or self-reference, he will find the
fewest who will give him that satisfaction; whilst most men are
afflicted with a coldness, an incuriosity, as soon as any object does
not connect with their self-love.  Though they talk of the object
before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is
laying little traps for your admiration.

        But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the
interest which his private history has for mankind, he still
converses with his family, or a few companions, -- perhaps with half
a dozen personalities that are famous in his neighborhood.  In
Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men.
Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster,
Mr. Greenough?  Have you heard Everett, Garrison, Father Taylor,
Theodore Parker?  Have you talked with Messieurs Turbinewheel,
Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees?  Then you may as well die.  In New
York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty.  Have
you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, -- two or three
scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of
newspapers?  New York is a sucked orange.  All conversation is at an
end, when we have discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities,
domestic or imported, which make up our American existence.  Nor do
we expect anybody to be other than a faint copy of these heroes.

        Life is very narrow.  Bring any club or company of intelligent
men together again after ten years, and if the presence of some
penetrating and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what
a confession of insanities would come up!  The "causes" to which we
have sacrificed, Tariff or Democracy, Whigism or Abolition,
Temperance or Socialism, would show like roots of bitterness and
dragons of wrath: and our talents are as mischievous as if each had
been seized upon by some bird of prey, which had whisked him away
from fortune, from truth, from the dear society of the poets, some
zeal, some bias, and only when he was now gray and nerveless, was it
relaxing its claws, and he awaking to sober perceptions.

        Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a
man has a range of affinities, through which he can modulate the
violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his
scale, and succor him against himself.  Culture redresses his
balance, puts him among his equals and superiors, revives the
delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude
and repulsion.

        'Tis not a compliment but a disparagement to consult a man only
on horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books,
and, whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to
the bantling he is known to fondle.  In the Norse heaven of our
forefathers, Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors; and
man's house has five hundred and forty floors.  His excellence is
facility of adaptation and of transition through many related points,
to wide contrasts and extremes.  Culture kills his exaggeration, his
conceit of his village or his city.  We must leave our pets at home,
when we go into the street, and meet men on broad grounds of good
meaning and good sense.  No performance is worth loss of geniality.
'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts
and philosophy.  In the Norse legend, Allfadir did not get a drink of
Mimir's spring, (the fountain of wisdom,) until he left his eye in
pledge.  And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his wrinkles, nor
conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their conversation
do not fit his impertinency, -- here is he to afflict us with his
personalities.  'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies
he is pointedly odious in his community.  Draw him out of this limbo
of irritability.  Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin.  You
restore to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring.
If you are the victim of your doing, who cares what you do?  We can
spare your opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history,
your syllogisms.  Your man of genius pays dear for his distinction.
His head runs up into a spire, and instead of a healthy man, merry
and wise, he is some mad dominie.  Nature is reckless of the
individual.  When she has points to carry, she carries them.  To wade
in marshes and sea-margins is the destiny of certain birds, and they
are so accurately made for this, that they are imprisoned in those
places.  Each animal out of its _habitat_ would starve.  To the
physician, each man, each woman, is an amplification of one organ.  A
soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and a dancer could not exchange
functions.  And thus we are victims of adaptation.

        The antidotes against this organic egotism, are, the range and
variety of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world,
with men of merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent
persons, and with the high resources of philosophy, art, and
religion: books, travel, society, solitude.

        The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer
trained, or, who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the
Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education.  "A boy,"
says Plato, "is the most vicious of all wild beasts;" and, in the
same spirit, the old English poet Gascoigne says, "a boy is better
unborn than untaught." The city breeds one kind of speech and
manners; the back-country a different style; the sea, another; the
army, a fourth.  We know that an army which can be confided in, may
be formed by discipline; that, by systematic discipline all men may
be made heroes: Marshal Lannes said to a French officer, "Know,
Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he never was
afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of having done the
thing before.  And, in all human action, those faculties will be
strong which are used.  Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I
will educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of
education, since to meliorate, is the law of nature; and men are
valued precisely as they exert onward or melio-rating force.  On the
other hand, poltroonery is the acknowledging an inferiority to be
incurable.

        Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper.  There
are people who can never understand a trope, or any second or
expanded sense given to your words, or any humor; but remain
literalists, after hearing the music, and poetry, and rhetoric, and
wit, of seventy or eighty years.  They are past the help of surgeon
or clergy.  But even these can understand pitchforks and the cry of
fire! and I have noticed in some of this class a marked dislike of
earthquakes.

        Let us make our education brave and preventive.  Politics is an
after-work, a poor patching.  We are always a little late.  The evil
is done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for
repeal of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting.  We
shall one day learn to supersede politics by education.  What we call
our root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance,
is only medicating the symptoms.  We must begin higher up, namely, in
Education.

        Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the
same advantage over the novice, as if you extended his life, ten,
fifty, or a hundred years.  And I think it the part of good sense to
provide every fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at
thirty or forty years, have to say, `This which I might do is made
hopeless through my want of weapons.'

        But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect;
that all success is hazardous and rare; that a large part of our cost
and pains is thrown away.  Nature takes the matter into her own
hands, and, though we must not omit any jot of our system, we can
seldom be sure that it has availed much, or, that as much good would
not have accrued from a different system.

        Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must
always enter into our notion of culture.  The best heads that ever
existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton,
were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to
undervalue letters.  Their opinion has weight, because they had means
of knowing the opposite opinion.  We look that a great man should be
a good reader, or, in proportion to the spontaneous power should be
the assimilating power.  Good criticism is very rare, and always
precious.  I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the
transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers.  I
like people who like Plato.  Because this love does not consist with
self-conceit.

        But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them.  He
sometimes gets ready very slowly.  You send your child to the
schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.  You send him
to the Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to
school, from the shop-windows.  You like the strict rules and the
long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and
refuses any companions but of his choosing.  He hates the grammar and
_Gradus_, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats.  Well, the
boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing up, if your
theory leaves out his gymnastic training.  Archery, cricket, gun and
fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so
are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and,-- provided only the boy
has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain, -- these will
not serve him less than the books.  He learns chess, whist, dancing,
and theatricals.  The father observes that another boy has learned
algebra and geometry in the same time.  But the first boy has
acquired much more than these poor games along with them.  He is
infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find
out, as you did, that when he rises from the game too long played, he
is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself.  Thenceforward it takes
place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience.
These minor skills and accomplishments, for example, dancing, are
tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being
master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much, on
which, otherwise, he would give a pedantic squint.  Landor said, "I
have suffered more from my bad dancing, than from all the misfortunes
and miseries of my life put together." Provided always the boy is
teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,)
football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing,
riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main
business to learn; -- riding, specially, of which Lord Herbert of
Cherbury said, "a good rider on a good horse is as much above himself
and others as the world can make him." Besides, the gun, fishing-rod,
boat, and horse, constitute, among all who use them, secret
freemasonries.  They are as if they belonged to one club.

        There is also a negative value in these arts.  Their chief use
to the youth, is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are,
and not to remain to him occasions of heart-burn.  We are full of
superstitions.  Each class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has
not; the refined, on rude strength; the democrat, on birth and
breeding.  One of the benefits of a college education is, to show the
boy its little avail.  I knew a leading man in a leading city, who,
having set his heart on an education at the university, and missed
it, could never quite feel himself the equal of his own brothers who
had gone thither.  His easy superiority to multitudes of professional
men could never quite countervail to him this imaginary defect.
Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards, pass to a poor boy for
something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free admission
to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or twice,
would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

        I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that
men run away to other countries, because they are not good in their
own, and run back to their own, because they pass for nothing in the
new places.  For the most part, only the light characters travel.
Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?  I have been
quoted as saying captious things about travel; but I mean to do
justice.  I think, there is a restlessness in our people, which
argues want of character.  All educated Americans, first or last, go
to Europe; -- perhaps, because it is their mental home, as the
invalid habits of this country might suggest.  An eminent teacher of
girls said, "the idea of a girl's education, is, whatever qualifies
them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this tape-worm of
Europe from the brain of our countrymen?  One sees very well what
their fate must be.  He that does not fill a place at home, cannot
abroad.  He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger
crowd.  You do not think you will find anything there which you have
not seen at home?  The stuff of all countries is just the same.  Do
you suppose, there is any country where they do not scald milkpans,
and swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish?
What is true anywhere is true everywhere.  And let him go where he
will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

        Of course, for some men, travel may be useful.  Naturalists,
discoverers, and sailors are born.  Some men are made for couriers,
exchangers, envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others
are for farmers and working-men.  And if the man is of a light and
social turn, and Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged
creature, framed for locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish
him with that breeding which gives currency, as sedulously as with
that which gives worth.  But let us not be pedantic, but allow to
travel its full effect.  The boy grown up on the farm, which he has
never left, is said in the country to have had _no chance_, and boys
and men of that condition look upon work on a railroad, or drudgery
in a city, as opportunity.  Poor country boys of Vermont and
Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had, to their peddling
trips to the Southern States.  California and the Pacific Coast is
now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times.  `To
have _some chance_' is their word.  And the phrase `to know the
world,' or to travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advantage
and superiority.  No doubt, to a man of sense, travel offers
advantages.  As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many
arts and trades, so many times is he a man.  A foreign country is a
point of comparison, wherefrom to judge his own.  One use of travel,
is, to recommend the books and works of home; [we go to Europe to be
Americanized;] and another, to find men.  For, as Nature has put
fruits apart in latitudes, a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge
and fine moral quality she lodges in distant men.  And thus, of the
six or seven teachers whom each man wants among his contemporaries,
it often happens, that one or two of them live on the other side of
the world.

        Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice,
when the stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is
required some foreign force, some diversion or alterative to prevent
stagnation.  And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best.
Just as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain,
and meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws,
rejoices in Dr. Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who looks at
Paris, at Naples, or at London, says, `If I should be driven from my
own home, here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most
prodigal amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could
contrive and accumulate.'

        Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of
railroads is to unite the advantages of town and country life,
neither of which we can spare.  A man should live in or near a large
town, because, let his own genius be what it may, it will repel quite
as much of agreeable and valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city,
the total attraction of all the citizens is sure to conquer, first or
last, every repulsion, and drag the most improbable hermit within its
walls some day in the year.  In town, he can find the
swimming-school, the gymnasium, the dancing-master, the
shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama; the chemist's shop,
the museum of natural history; the gallery of fine arts; the national
orators, in their turn; foreign travellers, the libraries, and his
club.  In the country, he can find solitude and reading, manly labor,
cheap living, and his old shoes; moors for game, hills for geology,
and groves for devotion.  Aubrey writes, "I have heard Thomas Hobbes
say, that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, there was a
good library and books enough for him, and his lordship stored the
library with what books he thought fit to be bought.  But the want of
good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he
conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he
found a great defect.  In the country, in long time, for want of good
conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on
them, like an old paling in an orchard."

        Cities give us collision.  'Tis said, London and New York take
the nonsense out of a man.  A great part of our education is
sympathetic and social.  Boys and girls who have been brought up with
well-informed and superior people, show in their manners an
inestimable grace.  Fuller says, that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a
subject from the King of Spain, every time he put off his hat." You
cannot have one well-bred man, without a whole society of such.  They
keep each other up to any high point.  Especially women; -- it
requires a great many cultivated women, -- saloons of bright,
elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease and refinement, to
spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to elegant society, in
order that you should have one Madame de Stael.  The head of a
commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician is brought into
daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the country, and
those too the driving-wheels, the business men of each section, and
one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a more searching
culture.  Besides, we must remember the high social possibilities of
a million of men.  The best bribe which London offers to-day to the
imagination, is, that, in such a vast variety of people and
conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic
character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may
hope to confront their counterparts.
 
      I wish cities could teach their best lesson, -- of quiet
manners.  It is the foible especially of American youth, --
pretension.  The mark of the man of the world is absence of
pretension.  He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone,
avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all,
performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact.  He calls his
employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their
sharpest weapon.  His conversation clings to the weather and the
news, yet he allows him-self to be surprised into thought, and the
unlocking of his learning and philosophy.  How the imagination is
piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in
gray clothes, -- of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering
levee; of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe, or
any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody; of
Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally;" of
Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in
intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to
appear a little more capricious than he was.  There are advantages in
the old hat and box-coat.  I have heard, that, throughout this
country, a certain respect is paid to good broadcloth; but dress
makes a little restraint: men will not commit themselves.  But the
box-coat is like wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they
think.  An old poet says,

        "Go far and go sparing,
        For you'll find it certain,
        The poorer and the baser you appear,
        The more you'll look through still." (*)

        (*) Beaumont and Fletcher: _The Tamer Tamed._

        Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the "Lay of the Humble,"
 
                "To me men are for what they are,
                They wear no masks with me."

        'Tis odd that our people should have -- not water on the brain,
-- but a little gas there.  A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans,
that, "whatever they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one
of the traits down in the books as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon,
is, a trick of self-disparagement.  To be sure, in old, dense
countries, among a million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no
distinction, and you find humorists.  In an English party, a man with
no marked manners or features, with a face like red dough,
unexpectedly discloses wit, learning, a wide range of topics, and
personal familiarity with good men in all parts of the world, until
you think you have fallen upon some illustrious personage.  Can it be
that the American forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pietish
barbarism just ready to die out, -- the love of the scarlet feather,
of beads, and tinsel?  The Italians are fond of red clothes, peacock
plumes, and embroidery; and I remember one rainy morning in the city
of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet umbrellas.  The
English have a plain taste.  The equipages of the grandees are plain.
A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city wealth.  Mr. Pitt,
like Mr. Pym, thought the title of _Mister_ good against any king in
Europe.  They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in
the poor, plain, dark Committee-room which the House of Commons sat
in, before the fire.

        Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are
found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles.  The countryman finds
the town a chop-house, a barber's shop.  He has lost the lines of
grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains, and with them, sobriety
and elevation.  He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who
live for show, servile to public opinion.  Life is dragged down to a
fracas of pitiful cares and disasters.  You say the gods ought to
respect a life whose objects are their own; but in cities they have
betrayed you to a cloud of insignificant annoyances:

 
        "Mirmidons, race feconde,
        Mirmidons,
        Enfin nous commandons;
        Jupiter livre le monde
        Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons." (*)
 
        'Tis heavy odds
        Against the gods,
        When they will match with myrmidons.
        We spawning, spawning myrmidons,
        Our turn to-day! we take command,
        Jove gives the globe into the hand
        Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

        (*) Beranger.

        What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail?
people whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for
the doctor, who coddle themselves, who toast their feet on the
register, who intrigue to secure a padded chair, and a corner out of
the draught.  Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their
infirmities, and the sun will go down on the unfinished tale.  Let
these triflers put us out of conceit with petty comforts.  To a man
at work, the frost is but a color: the rain, the wind, he forgot them
when he came in.  Let us learn to live coarsely, dress plainly, and
lie hard.  The least habit of dominion over the palate has certain
good effects not easily estimated.  Neither will we be driven into a
quiddling abstemiousness.  'Tis a superstition to insist on a special
diet.  All is made at last of the same chemical atoms.

        A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants.  How can
you mind diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure
you make in company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass,
when you think how paltry are the machinery and the workers?
Wordsworth was praised to me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to
his country neighbors an example of a modest household where comfort
and culture were secured, without display.  And a tender boy who
wears his rusty cap and outgrown coat, that he may secure the coveted
place in college, and the right in the library, is educated to some
purpose.  There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor
and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into
literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that
saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty,
and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school;
works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms,
six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then
goes back cheerfully to work again.

        We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they
must be used; yet cautiously, and haughtily, -- and will yield their
best values to him who best can do without them.  Keep the town for
occasions, but the habits should be formed to retirement.  Solitude,
the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold,
obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than
suns and stars.  He who should inspire and lead his race must be
defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living,
breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their
opinions.  "In the morning, -- solitude;" said Pythagoras; that
Nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company,
and that her favorite may make acquaintance with those divine
strengths which disclose themselves to serious and abstracted
thought.  'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus, Archimedes, Hermes,
Newton, Milton, Wordsworth, did not live in a crowd, but descended
into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise instructor
will press this point of securing to the young soul in the
disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and
habits of solitude.  The high advantage of university-life is often
the mere mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and
fire, -- which parents will allow the boy without hesitation at
Cambridge, but do not think needful at home.  We say solitude, to
mark the character of the tone of thought; but if it can be shared
between two or more than two, it is happier, and not less noble.  "We
four," wrote Neander to his sacred friends, "will enjoy at Halle the
inward blessedness of a _civitas Dei_, whose foundations are forever
friendship.  The more I know you, the more I dissatisfy and must
dissatisfy all my wonted companions.  Their very presence stupefies
me.  The common understanding withdraws itself from the one centre of
all existence."

        Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities that
more catholic and humane relations may appear.  The saint and poet
seek privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the
secret of culture, to interest the man more in his public, than in
his private quality.  Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many
comments in the journals, and in conversation.  From these it is
easy, at last, to eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it;
and that is, in the main, unfavorable.  The poet, as a craftsman, is
only interested in the praise accorded to him, and not in the
censure, though it be just.  And the poor little poet hearkens only
to that, and rejects the censure, as proving incapacity in the
critic.  But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a stockholder in both
companies, -- say Mr. Curfew, -- in the Curfew stock, and in the
_humanity_ stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the
demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew, as his interest in the
former gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew.  For, the
depreciation of his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the
humanity stock.  As soon as he sides with his critic against himself,
with joy, he is a cultivated man.

        We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all
action, or they are nought.  I must have children, I must have
events, I must have a social state and history, or my thinking and
speaking want body or basis.  But to give these accessories any
value, I must know them as contingent and rather showy possessions,
which pass for more to the people than to me.  We see this
abstraction in scholars, as a matter of course: but what a charm it
adds when observed in practical men.  Bonaparte, like Caesar, was
intellectual, and could look at every object for itself, without
affection.  Though an egotist _a l'outrance_, he could criticize a
play, a building, a character, on universal grounds, and give a just
opinion.  A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in
trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some
intellectual taste or skill; as when we learn of Lord Fairfax, the
Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or of
the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of
a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist,
his devotion to ornithology.  So, if in travelling in the dreary
wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat
a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug
him.  In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers,
sea-captains, and civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if
only through a certain gentleness when off duty; a good-natured
admission that there are illusions, and who shall say that he is not
their sport?  We only vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say,
that culture opens the sense of beauty.  A man is a beggar who only
lives to the useful, and, however he may serve as a pin or rivet in
the social machine, cannot be said to have arrived at
self-possession.  I suffer, every day, from the want of perception of
beauty in people.  They do not know the charm with which all moments
and objects can be embellished, the charm of manners, of
self-command, of benevolence.  Repose and cheerfulness are the badge
of the gentleman, -- repose in energy.  The Greek battle-pieces are
calm; the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a
serene aspect; as we say of Niagara, that it falls without speed.  A
cheerful, intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough.
For it indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

        When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated,
and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable
movements.  It is noticed, that the consideration of the great
periods and spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind, and an
indifference to death.  The influence of fine scenery, the presence
of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.
Even a high dome, and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a
sensible effect on manners.  I have heard that stiff people lose
something of their awkwardness under high ceilings, and in spacious
halls.  I think, sculpture and painting have an effect to teach us
manners, and abolish hurry.

        But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the
empirical skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade, and the
useful arts.  There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to
marshal and adjust particulars, which can only come from an insight
of their whole connection.  The orator who has once seen things in
their divine order, will never quite lose sight of this, and will
come to affairs as from a higher ground, and, though he will say
nothing of philosophy, he will have a certain mastery in dealing with
them, and an incapableness of being dazzled or frighted, which will
distinguish his handling from that of attorneys and factors.  A man
who stands on a good footing with the heads of parties at Washington,
reads the rumors of the newspapers, and the guesses of provincial
politicians, with a key to the right and wrong in each statement, and
sees well enough where all this will end.  Archimedes will look
through your Connecticut machine, at a glance, and judge of its
fitness.  And much more, a wise man who knows not only what Plato,
but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair he
deals with, to a certain majesty.  Plato says, Pericles owed this
elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras.  Burke descended from a
higher sphere when he would influence human affairs.  Franklin,
Adams, Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which
the brawls of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

        But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the
apprentices, but for proficients.  These are lessons only for the
brave.  We must know our friends under ugly masks.  The calamities
are our friends.  Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse: --

        "Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill-will,
        And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,
        Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,
        Almost all ways to any better course;
        With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,
        And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty."
 
        We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism.  But
the wiser God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal
solitude, that belong to truth-speaking.  Try the rough water as well
as the smooth.  Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing.  When
the state is unquiet, personal qualities are more than ever decisive.
Fear not a revolution which will constrain you to live five years in
one.  Don't be so tender at making an enemy now and then.  Be willing
to go to Coventry sometimes, and let the populace bestow on you their
coldest contempts.  The finished man of the world must eat of every
apple once.  He must hold his hatreds also at arm's length, and not
remember spite.  He has neither friends nor enemies, but values men
only as channels of power.

        He who aims high, must dread an easy home and popular manners.
Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and
odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.  If there is any great
and good thing in store for you, it will not come at the first or the
second call, nor in the shape of fashion, ease, and city
drawing-rooms.  Popularity is for dolls.  "Steep and craggy," said
Porphyry, "is the path of the gods." Open your Marcus Antoninus.  In
the opinion of the ancients, he was the great man who scorned to
shine, and who contested the frowns of fortune.  They preferred the
noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with winds and waves,
dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into harbor with
colors flying and guns firing.  There is none of the social goods
that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not
take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

        Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of
dress, -- "If I cannot do as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I
shall not carry things far." And the youth must rate at its true mark
the inconceivable levity of local opinion.  The longer we live, the
more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and
every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it
to dictate.

        "All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues," said
Burke, "are almost too costly for humanity." Who wishes to be severe?
Who wishes to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor,
and low, and impolite? and who that dares do it, can keep his temper
sweet, his frolic spirits?  The high virtues are not debonair, but
have their redress in being illustrious at last.  What forests of
laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm
against the opinion of their contemporaries!  The measure of a master
is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years
later.

        Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early.  In
talking with scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions
those years of boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature
a religious and infinite quality in their esteem.  I find, too, that
the chance for appreciation is much increased by being the son of an
appreciator, and that these boys who now grow up are caught not only
years too late, but two or three births too late, to make the best
scholars of.  And I think it a presentable motive to a scholar, that,
as, in an old community, a well-born proprietor is usually found,
after the first heats of youth, to be a careful husband, and to feel
a habitual desire that the estate shall suffer no harm by his
administration, but shall be delivered down to the next heir in as
good condition as he received it; -- so, a considerate man will
reckon himself a subject of that secular melioration by which mankind
is mollified, cured, and refined, and will shun every expenditure of
his forces on pleasure or gain, which will jeopardize this social and
secular accumulation.

        The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental
forms, and rose to the more complex, as fast as the earth was fit for
their dwelling-place; and that the lower perish, as the higher
appear.  Very few of our race can be said to be yet finished men.  We
still carry sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior
quadruped organization.  We call these millions men; but they are not
yet men.  Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all
the music that can be brought to disengage him.  If Love, red Love,
with tears and joy; if Want with his scourge; if War with his
cannonade; if Christianity with its charity; if Trade with its money;
if Art with its portfolios; if Science with her telegraphs through
the deeps of space and time; can set his dull nerves throbbing, and
by loud taps on the tough chrysalis, can break its walls, and let the
new creature emerge erect and free, -- make way, and sing paean!  The
age of the quadruped is to go out, -- the age of the brain and of the
heart is to come in.  The time will come when the evil forms we have
known can no more be organized.  Man's culture can spare nothing,
wants all the material.  He is to convert all impediments into
instruments, all enemies into power.  The formidable mischief will
only make the more useful slave.  And if one shall read the future of
the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature to mount and
meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in the human
being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not
overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos
and gehenna.  He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells
into benefit.

 
        V
 
        BEHAVIOR
 
        Grace, Beauty, and Caprice
        Build this golden portal;
        Graceful women, chosen men
        Dazzle every mortal:
        Their sweet and lofty countenance
        His enchanting food;
        He need not go to them, their forms
        Beset his solitude.
        He looketh seldom in their face,
        His eyes explore the ground,
        The green grass is a looking-glass
        Whereon their traits are found.
        Little he says to them,
        So dances his heart in his breast,
        Their tranquil mien bereaveth him
        Of wit, of words, of rest.
        Too weak to win, too fond to shun
        The tyrants of his doom,
        The much deceived Endymion
        Slips behind a tomb.

 
        _Behavior_

        The soul which animates Nature is not less sigshed in the
figure, movement, and gesture of animated bodies, than in its last
vehicle of articulate speech.  This silent and subtile language is
Manners; not _what_, but _how_.  Life expresses.  A statue has no
tongue, and needs none.  Good tableaux do not need declamation.
Nature tells every secret once.  Yes, but in man she tells it all the
time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face, and parts of the face,
and by the whole action of the machine.  The visible carriage or
action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his
will combined, we call manners.  What are they but thought entering
the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the body, the speech
and behavior?

        There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to
boil an egg.  Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a
stroke of genius or of love, -- now repeated and hardened into usage.
They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is
washed, and its details adorned.  If they are superficial, so are the
dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows.  Manners
are very communicable: men catch them from each other.  Consuelo, in
the romance, boasts of the lessons she had given the nobles in
manners, on the stage; and, in real life, Talma taught Napoleon the
arts of behavior.  Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and
the baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace,
better the instruction.  They stereotype the lesson they have learned
into a mode.

        The power of manners is incessant, -- an element as
unconcealable as fire.  The nobility cannot in any country be
disguised, and no more in a republic or a democracy, than in a
kingdom.  No man can resist their influence.  There are certain
manners which are learned in good society, of that force, that, if a
person have them, he or she must be considered, and is everywhere
welcome, though without beauty, or wealth, or genius.  Give a boy
address and accomplishments, and you give him the mastery of palaces
and fortunes where he goes.  He has not the trouble of earning or
owning them: they solicit him to enter and possess.  We send girls of
a timid, retreating disposition to the boarding-school, to the
riding-school, to the ballroom, or wheresoever they can come into
acquaintance and nearness of leading persons of their own sex; where
they might learn address, and see it near at hand.  The power of a
woman of fashion to lead, and also to daunt and repel, derives from
their belief that she knows resources and behaviors not known to
them; but when these have mastered her secret, they learn to confront
her, and recover their self-possession.

        Every day bears witness to their gentle rule.  People who would
obtrude, now do not obtrude.  The mediocre circle learns to demand
that which belongs to a high state of nature or of culture.  Your
manners are always under examination, and by committees little
suspected, -- a police in citizens' clothes, -- but are awarding or
denying you very high prizes when you least think of it.

        We talk much of utilities, -- but 'tis our manners that
associate us.  In hours of business, we go to him who knows, or has,
or does this or that which we want, and we do not let our taste or
feeling stand in the way.  But this activity over, we return to the
indolent state, and wish for those we can be at ease with; those who
will go where we go, whose manners do not offend us, whose social
tone chimes with ours.  When we reflect on their persuasive and
cheering force; how they recommend, prepare, and draw people
together; how, in all clubs, manners make the members; how manners
make the fortune of the ambitious youth; that, for the most part, his
manners marry him, and, for the most part, he marries manners; when
we think what keys they are, and to what secrets; what high lessons
and inspiring tokens of character they convey; and what divination is
required in us, for the reading of this fine telegraph, we see what
range the subject has, and what relations to convenience, power, and
beauty.

        Their first service is very low, -- when they are the minor
morals: but 'tis the beginning of civility, -- to make us, I mean,
endurable to each other.  We prize them for their rough-plastic,
abstergent force; to get people out of the quadruped state; to get
them washed, clothed, and set up on end; to slough their animal husks
and habits; compel them to be clean; overawe their spite and
meanness, teach them to stifle the base, and choose the generous
expression, and make them know how much happier the generous
behaviors are.

        Bad behavior the laws cannot reach.  Society is infested with
rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the
rest, and whom, a public opinion concentrated into good manners,
forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach: -- the contradictors
and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who
conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and
do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight: -- I have
seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say
something which they do not understand: -- then the overbold, who
make their own invitation to your hearth; the persevering talker, who
gives you his society in large, saturating doses; the pitiers of
themselves, -- a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies
on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the monotones; in
short, every stripe of absurdity; -- these are social inflictions
which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from, and which must
be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and proverbs, and
familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in their
school-days.

        In the hotels on the banks of the Mississippi, they print, or
used to print, among the rules of the house, that "no gentleman can
be permitted to come to the public table without his coat;" and in
the same country, in the pews of the churches, little placards plead
with the worshipper against the fury of expectoration.  Charles
Dickens self-sacrificingly undertook the reformation of our American
manners in unspeakable particulars.  I think the lesson was not quite
lost; that it held bad manners up, so that the churls could see the
deformity.  Unhappily, the book had its own deformities.  It ought
not to need to print in a reading-room a caution to strangers not to
speak loud; nor to persons who look over fine engravings, that they
should be handled like cobwebs and butterflies' wings; nor to persons
who look at marble statues, that they shall not smite them with
canes.  But, even in the perfect civilization of this city, such
cautions are not quite needless in the Athenaeum and City Library.

        Manners are factitious, and grow out of circumstance as well as
out of character.  If you look at the pictures of patricians and of
peasants, of different periods and countries, you will see how well
they match the same classes in our towns.  The modern aristocrat not
only is well drawn in Titian's Venetian doges, and in Roman coins and
statues, but also in the pictures which Commodore Perry brought home
of dignitaries in Japan.  Broad lands and great interests not only
arrive to such heads as can manage them, but form manners of power.
A keen eye, too, will see nice gradations of rank, or see in the
manners the degree of homage the party is wont to receive.  A prince
who is accustomed every day to be courted and deferred to by the
highest grandees, acquires a corresponding expectation, and a
becoming mode of receiving and replying to this homage.

        There are always exceptional people and modes.  English
grandees affect to be farmers.  Claverhouse is a fop, and, under the
finish of dress, and levity of behavior, hides the terror of his war.
But Nature and Destiny are honest, and never fail to leave their
mark, to hang out a sign for each and for every quality.  It is much
to conquer one's face, and perhaps the ambitious youth thinks he has
got the whole secret when he has learned, that disengaged manners are
commanding.  Don't be deceived by a facile exterior.  Tender men
sometimes have strong wills.  We had, in Massachusetts, an old
statesman, who had sat all his life in courts and in chairs of state,
without overcoming an extreme irritability of face, voice, and
bearing: when he spoke, his voice would not serve him; it cracked, it
broke, it wheezed, it piped; -- little cared he; he knew that it had
got to pipe, or wheeze, or screech his argument and his indignation.
When he sat down, after speaking, he seemed in a sort of fit, and
held on to his chair with both hands: but underneath all this
irritability, was a puissant will, firm, and advancing, and a memory
in which lay in order and method like geologic strata every fact of
his history, and under the control of his will.

        Manners are partly factitious, but, mainly, there must be
capacity for culture in the blood.  Else all culture is vain.  The
obstinate prejudice in favor of blood, which lies at the base of the
feudal and monarchical fabrics of the old world, has some reason in
common experience.  Every man,-- mathematician, artist, soldier, or
merchant, -- looks with confidence for some traits and talents in his
own child, which he would not dare to presume in the child of a
stranger.  The Orientalists are very orthodox on this point.  "Take a
thorn-bush," said the emir Abdel-Kader, "and sprinkle it for a whole
year with water; -- it will yield nothing but thorns.  Take a
date-tree, leave it without culture, and it will always produce
dates.  Nobility is the date-tree, and the Arab populace is a bush of
thorns."

        A main fact in the history of manners is the wonderful
expressiveness of the human body.  If it were made of glass, or of
air, and the thoughts were written on steel tablets within, it could
not publish more truly its meaning than now.  Wise men read very
sharply all your private history in your look and gait and behavior.
The whole economy of nature is bent on expression.  The tell-tale
body is all tongues.  Men are like Geneva watches with crystal faces
which expose the whole movement.  They carry the liquor of life
flowing up and down in these beautiful bottles, and announcing to the
curious how it is with them.  The face and eyes reveal what the
spirit is doing, how old it is, what aims it has.  The eyes indicate
the antiquity of the soul, or, through how many forms it has already
ascended.  It almost violates the proprieties, if we say above the
breath here, what the confessing eyes do not hesitate to utter to
every street passenger.

        Man cannot fix his eye on the sun, and so far seems imperfect.
In Siberia, a late traveller found men who could see the satellites
of Jupiter with their unarmed eye.  In some respects the animals
excel us.  The birds have a longer sight, beside the advantage by
their wings of a higher observatory.  A cow can bid her calf, by
secret signal, probably of the eye, to run away, or to lie down and
hide itself.  The jockeys say of certain horses, that "they look over
the whole ground." The out-door life, and hunting, and labor, give
equal vigor to the human eye.  A farmer looks out at you as strong as
the horse; his eye-beam is like the stroke of a staff.  An eye can
threaten like a loaded and levelled gun, or can insult like hissing
or kicking; or, in its altered mood, by beams of kindness, it can
make the heart dance with joy.

        The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.  When a thought
strikes us, the eyes fix, and remain gazing at a distance; in
enumerating the names of persons or of countries, as France, Germany,
Spain, Turkey, the eyes wink at each new name.  There is no nicety of
learning sought by the mind, which the eyes do not vie in acquiring.
"An artist," said Michel Angelo, "must have his measuring tools not
in the hand, but in the eye;" and there is no end to the catalogue of
its performances, whether in indolent vision, (that of health and
beauty,) or in strained vision, (that of art and labor.)

        Eyes are bold as lions, -- roving, running, leaping, here and
there, far and near.  They speak all languages.  They wait for no
introduction; they are no Englishmen; ask no leave of age, or rank;
they respect neither poverty nor riches, neither learning nor power,
nor virtue, nor sex, but intrude, and come again, and go through and
through you, in a moment of time.  What inundation of life and
thought is discharged from one soul into another, through them!  The
glance is natural magic.  The mysterious communication established
across a house between two entire strangers, moves all the springs of
wonder.  The communication by the glance is in the greatest part not
subject to the control of the will.  It is the bodily symbol of
identity of nature.  We look into the eyes to know if this other form
is another self, and the eyes will not lie, but make a faithful
confession what inhabitant is there.  The revelations are sometimes
terrific.  The confession of a low, usurping devil is there made, and
the observer shall seem to feel the stirring of owls, and bats, and
horned hoofs, where he looked for innocence and simplicity.  'Tis
remarkable, too, that the spirit that appears at the windows of the
house does at once invest himself in a new form of his own, to the
mind of the beholder.

        The eyes of men converse as much as their tongues, with the
advantage, that the ocular dialect needs no dictionary, but is
understood all the world over.  When the eyes say one thing, and the
tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first.
If the man is off his centre, the eyes show it.  You can read in the
eyes of your companion, whether your argument hits him, though his
tongue will not confess it.  There is a look by which a man shows he
is going to say a good thing, and a look when he has said it.  Vain
and forgotten are all the fine offers and offices of hospitality, if
there is no holiday in the eye.  How many furtive inclinations avowed
by the eye, though dissembled by the lips!  One comes away from a
company, in which, it may easily happen, he has said nothing, and no
important remark has been addressed to him, and yet, if in sympathy
with the society, he shall not have a sense of this fact, such a
stream of life has been flowing into him, and out from him, through
the eyes.  There are eyes, to be sure, that give no more admission
into the man than blueberries.  Others are liquid and deep, -- wells
that a man might fall into; -- others are aggressive and devouring,
seem to call out the police, take all too much notice, and require
crowded Broadways, and the security of millions, to protect
individuals against them.  The military eye I meet, now darkly
sparkling under clerical, now under rustic brows.  'Tis the city of
Lacedaemon; 'tis a stack of bayonets.  There are asking eyes,
asserting eyes, prowling eyes; and eyes full of fate, -- some of
good, and some of sinister omen.  The alleged power to charm down
insanity, or ferocity in beasts, is a power behind the eye.  It must
be a victory achieved in the will, before it can be signified in the
eye.  'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact
indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always
learning to read it.  A complete man should need no auxiliaries to
his personal presence.  Whoever looked on him would consent to his
will, being certified that his aims were generous and universal.  The
reason why men do not obey us, is because they see the mud at the
bottom of our eye.

        If the organ of sight is such a vehicle of power, the other
features have their own.  A man finds room in the few square inches
of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression
of all his history, and his wants.  The sculptor, and Winckelmann,
and Lavater, will tell you how significant a feature is the nose; how
its forms express strength or weakness of will, and good or bad
temper.  The nose of Julius Caesar, of Dante, and of Pitt, suggest
"the terrors of the beak." What refinement, and what limitations, the
teeth betray!  "Beware you don't laugh," said the wise mother, "for
then you show all your faults."

        Balzac left in manuscript a chapter, which he called "_Theorie
de la demarche_," in which he says: "The look, the voice, the
respiration, and the attitude or walk, are identical.  But, as it has
not been given to man, the power to stand guard, at once, over these
four different simultaneous expressions of his thought, watch that
one which speaks out the truth, and you will know the whole man."

        Palaces interest us mainly in the exhibition of manners, which,
in the idle and expensive society dwelling in them, are raised to a
high art.  The maxim of courts is, that manner is power.  A calm and
resolute bearing, a polished speech, an embellishment of trifles, and
the art of hiding all uncomfortable feeling, are essential to the
courtier: and Saint Simon, and Cardinal de Retz, and R;oederer, and
an encyclopaedia of _Memoires_, will instruct you, if you wish, in
those potent secrets.  Thus, it is a point of pride with kings, to
remember faces and names.  It is reported of one prince, that his
head had the air of leaning downwards, in order not to humble the
crowd.  There are people who come in ever like a child with a piece
of good news.  It was said of the late Lord Holland, that he always
came down to breakfast with the air of a man who had just met with
some signal good-fortune.  In "_Notre Dame_," the grandee took his
place on the dais, with the look of one who is thinking of something
else.  But we must not peep and eavesdrop at palace-doors.

        Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.  A
scholar may be a well-bred man, or he may not.  The enthusiast is
introduced to polished scholars in society, and is chilled and
silenced by finding himself not in their element.  They all have
somewhat which he has not, and, it seems, ought to have.  But if he
finds the scholar apart from his companions, it is then the
enthusiast's turn, and the scholar has no defence, but must deal on
his terms.  Now they must fight the battle out on their private
strengths.  What is the talent of that character so common, -- the
successful man of the world, -- in all marts, senates, and
drawing-rooms?  Manners: manners of power; sense to see his
advantage, and manners up to it.  See him approach his man.  He knows
that troops behave as they are handled at first; -- that is his cheap
secret; just what happens to every two persons who meet on any
affair, -- one instantly perceives that he has the key of the
situation, that his will comprehends the other's will, as the cat
does the mouse; and he has only to use courtesy, and furnish
good-natured reasons to his victim to cover up the chain, lest he be
shamed into resistance.

        The theatre in which this science of manners has a formal
importance is not with us a court, but dress-circles, wherein, after
the close of the day's business, men and women meet at leisure, for
mutual entertainment, in ornamented drawing-rooms.  Of course, it has
every variety of attraction and merit; but, to earnest persons, to
youths or maidens who have great objects at heart, we cannot extol it
highly.  A well-dressed, talkative company, where each is bent to
amuse the other, -- yet the high-born Turk who came hither fancied
that every woman seemed to be suffering for a chair; that all the
talkers were brained and exhausted by the deoxygenated air: it
spoiled the best persons: it put all on stilts.  Yet here are the
secret biographies written and read.  The aspect of that man is
repulsive; I do not wish to deal with him.  The other is irritable,
shy, and on his guard.  The youth looks humble and manly: I choose
him.  Look on this woman.  There is not beauty, nor brilliant
sayings, nor distinguished power to serve you; but all see her
gladly; her whole air and impression are healthful.  Here come the
sentimentalists, and the invalids.  Here is Elise, who caught cold in
coming into the world, and has always increased it since.  Here are
creep-mouse manners; and thievish manners.  "Look at Northcote," said
Fuseli; "he looks like a rat that has seen a cat." In the shallow
company, easily excited, easily tired, here is the columnar Bernard:
the Alleghanies do not express more repose than his behavior.  Here
are the sweet following eyes of Cecile: it seemed always that she
demanded the heart.  Nothing can be more excellent in kind than the
Corinthian grace of Gertrude's manners, and yet Blanche, who has no
manners, has better manners than she; for the movements of Blanche
are the sallies of a spirit which is sufficient for the moment, and
she can afford to express every thought by instant action.

        Manners have been somewhat cynically defined to be a
contrivance of wise men to keep fools at a distance.  Fashion is
shrewd to detect those who do not belong to her train, and seldom
wastes her attentions.  Society is very swift in its instincts, and,
if you do not belong to it, resists and sneers at you; or quietly
drops you.  The first weapon enrages the party attacked; the second
is still more effective, but is not to be resisted, as the date of
the transaction is not easily found.  People grow up and grow old
under this infliction, and never suspect the truth, ascribing the
solitude which acts on them very injuriously, to any cause but the
right one.

        The basis of good manners is self-reliance.  Necessity is the
law of all who are not self-possessed.  Those who are not
self-possessed, obtrude, and pain us.  Some men appear to feel that
they belong to a Pariah caste.  They fear to offend, they bend and
apologize, and walk through life with a timid step.  As we sometimes
dream that we are in a well-dressed company without any coat, so
Godfrey acts ever as if he suffered from some mortifying
circumstance.  The hero should find himself at home, wherever he is:
should impart comfort by his own security and good-nature to all
beholders.  The hero is suffered to be himself.  A person of strong
mind comes to perceive that for him an immunity is secured so long as
he renders to society that service which is native and proper to him,
-- an immunity from all the observances, yea, and duties, which
society so tyrannically imposes on the rank and file of its members.
"Euripides," says Aspasia, "has not the fine manners of Sophocles;
but," -- she adds good-humoredly, "the movers and masters of our
souls have surely a right to throw out their limbs as carelessly as
they please, on the world that belongs to them, and before the
creatures they have animated." (*)

        (*) Landor: _Pericles and Aspasia_.

        Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.
Friendship should be surrounded with ceremonies and respects, and not
crushed into corners.  Friendship requires more time than poor busy
men can usually command.  Here comes to me Roland, with a delicacy of
sentiment leading and inwrapping him like a divine cloud or holy
ghost.  'Tis a great destitution to both that this should not be
entertained with large leisures, but contrariwise should be balked by
importunate affairs.

        But through this lustrous varnish, the reality is ever shining.
'Tis hard to keep the _what_ from breaking through this pretty
painting of the _how_.  The core will come to the surface.  Strong
will and keen perception overpower old manners, and create new; and
the thought of the present moment has a greater value than all the
past.  In persons of character, we do not remark manners, because of
their instantaneousness.  We are surprised by the thing done, out of
all power to watch the way of it.  Yet nothing is more charming than
to recognize the great style which runs through the actions of such.
People masquerade before us in their fortunes, titles, offices, and
connections, as academic or civil presidents, or senators, or
professors, or great lawyers, and impose on the frivolous, and a good
deal on each other, by these fames.  At least, it is a point of
prudent good manners to treat these reputations tenderly, as if they
were merited.  But the sad realist knows these fellows at a glance,
and they know him; as when in Paris the chief of the police enters a
ballroom, so many diamonded pretenders shrink and make themselves as
inconspicuous as they can, or give him a supplicating look as they
pass.  "I had received," said a sibyl, "I had received at birth the
fatal gift of penetration:" -- and these Cassandras are always born.

        Manners impress as they indicate real power.  A man who is sure
of his point, carries a broad and contented expression, which
everybody reads.  And you cannot rightly train one to an air and
manner, except by making him the kind of man of whom that manner is
the natural expression.  Nature forever puts a premium on reality.
What is done for effect, is seen to be done for effect; what is done
for love, is felt to be done for love.  A man inspires affection and
honor, because he was not lying in wait for these.  The things of a
man for which we visit him, were done in the dark and the cold.  A
little integrity is better than any career.  So deep are the sources
of this surface-action, that even the size of your companion seems to
vary with his freedom of thought.  Not only is he larger, when at
ease, and his thoughts generous, but everything around him becomes
variable with expression.  No carpenter's rule, no rod and chain,
will measure the dimensions of any house or house-lot: go into the
house: if the proprietor is constrained and deferring, 'tis of no
importance how large his house, how beautiful his grounds, -- you
quickly come to the end of all: but if the man is self-possessed,
happy, and at home, his house is deep-founded, indefinitely large and
interesting, the roof and dome buoyant as the sky.  Under the
humblest roof, the commonest person in plain clothes sits there
massive, cheerful, yet formidable like the Egyptian colossi.

        Neither Aristotle, nor Leibnitz, nor Junius, nor Champollion
has set down the grammar-rules of this dialect, older than Sanscrit;
but they who cannot yet read English, can read this.  Men take each
other's measure, when they meet for the first time, -- and every time
they meet.  How do they get this rapid knowledge, even before they
speak, of each other's power and dispositions?  One would say, that
the persuasion of their speech is not in what they say, -- or, that
men do not convince by their argument, -- but by their personality,
by who they are, and what they said and did heretofore.  A man
already strong is listened to, and everything he says is applauded.
Another opposes him with sound argument, but the argument is scouted,
until by and by it gets into the mind of some weighty person; then it
begins to tell on the community.

        Self-reliance is the basis of behavior, as it is the guaranty
that the powers are not squandered in too much demonstration.  In
this country, where school education is universal, we have a
superficial culture, and a profusion of reading and writing and
expression.  We parade our nobilities in poems and orations, instead
of working them up into happiness.  There is a whisper out of the
ages to him who can understand it, -- `whatever is known to thyself
alone, has always very great value.' There is some reason to believe,
that, when a man does not write his poetry, it escapes by other vents
through him, instead of the one vent of writing; clings to his form
and manners, whilst poets have often nothing poetical about them
except their verses.  Jacobi said, that "when a man has fully
expressed his thought, he has somewhat less possession of it." One
would say, the rule is, -- What a man is irresistibly urged to say,
helps him and us.  In explaining his thought to others, he explains
it to himself: but when he opens it for show, it corrupts him.

        Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are
their literature.  Novels are the journal or record of manners; and
the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the
novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life
more worthily.  The novels used to be all alike, and had a quite
vulgar tone.  The novels used to lead us on to a foolish interest in
the fortunes of the boy and girl they described.  The boy was to be
raised from a humble to a high position.  He was in want of a wife
and a castle, and the object of the story was to supply him with one
or both.  We watched sympathetically, step by step, his climbing,
until, at last, the point is gained, the wedding day is fixed, and we
follow the gala procession home to the castle, when the doors are
slammed in our face, and the poor reader is left outside in the cold,
not enriched by so much as an idea, or a virtuous impulse.

        But the victories of character are instant, and victories for
all.  Its greatness enlarges all.  We are fortified by every heroic
anecdote.  The novels are as useful as Bibles, if they teach you the
secret, that the best of life is conversation, and the greatest
success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere
people.  'Tis a French definition of friendship, _rien que
s'entendre_, good understanding.  The highest compact we can make
with our fellow, is, -- `Let there be truth between us two
forevermore.' That is the charm in all good novels, as it is the
charm in all good histories, that the heroes mutually understand,
from the first, and deal loyally, and with a profound trust in each
other.  It is sublime to feel and say of another, I need never meet,
or speak, or write to him: we need not reinforce ourselves, or send
tokens of remembrance: I rely on him as on myself: if he did thus or
thus, I know it was right.

        In all the superior people I have met, I notice directness,
truth spoken more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of
malformation, had been trained away.  What have they to conceal?
What have they to exhibit?  Between simple and noble persons, there
is always a quick intelligence: they recognize at sight, and meet on
a better ground than the talents and skills they may chance to
possess, namely, on sincerity and uprightness.  For, it is not what
talents or genius a man has, but how he is to his talents, that
constitutes friendship and character.  The man that stands by
himself, the universe stands by him also.  It is related of the monk
Basle, that, being excommunicated by the Pope, he was, at his death,
sent in charge of an angel to find a fit place of suffering in hell:
but, such was the eloquence and good-humor of the monk, that,
wherever he went he was received gladly, and civilly treated, even by
the most uncivil angels: and, when he came to discourse with them,
instead of contradicting or forcing him, they took his part, and
adopted his manners: and even good angels came from far, to see him,
and take up their abode with him.  The angel that was sent to find a
place of torment for him, attempted to remove him to a worse pit, but
with no better success; for such was the contented spirit of the
monk, that he found something to praise in every place and company,
though in hell, and made a kind of heaven of it.  At last the
escorting angel returned with his prisoner to them that sent him,
saying, that no phlegethon could be found that would burn him; for
that, in whatever condition, Basle remained incorrigibly Basle.  The
legend says, his sentence was remitted, and he was allowed to go into
heaven, and was canonized as a saint.

        There is a stroke of magnanimity in the correspondence of
Bonaparte with his brother Joseph, when the latter was King of Spain,
and complained that he missed in Napoleon's letters the affectionate
tone which had marked their childish correspondence.  "I am sorry,"
replies Napoleon, "you think you shall find your brother again only
in the Elysian Fields.  It is natural, that at forty, he should not
feel towards you as he did at twelve.  But his feelings towards you
have greater truth and strength.  His friendship has the features of
his mind."

        How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of
heroic manners!  We will pardon them the want of books, of arts, and
even of the gentler virtues.  How tenaciously we remember them!  Here
is a lesson which I brought along with me in boyhood from the Latin
School, and which ranks with the best of Roman anecdotes.  Marcus
Scaurus was accused by Quintus Varius Hispanus, that he had excited
the allies to take arms against the Republic.  But he, full of
firmness and gravity, defended himself in this manner: "Quintus
Varius Hispanus alleges that Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate,
excited the allies to arms: Marcus Scaurus, President of the Senate,
denies it.  There is no witness.  Which do you believe, Romans?"
_"Utri creditis, Quirites?"_ When he had said these words, he was
absolved by the assembly of the people.

        I have seen manners that make a similar impression with
personal beauty; that give the like exhilaration, and refine us like
that; and, in memorable experiences, they are suddenly better than
beauty, and make that superfluous and ugly.  But they must be marked
by fine perception, the acquaintance with real beauty.  They must
always show self-control: you shall not be facile, apologetic, or
leaky, but king over your word; and every gesture and action shall
indicate power at rest.  Then they must be inspired by the good
heart.  There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior,
like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.  'Tis good to
give a stranger a meal, or a night's lodging.  'Tis better to be
hospitable to his good meaning and thought, and give courage to a
companion.  We must be as courteous to a man as we are to a picture,
which we are willing to give the advantage of a good light.  Special
precepts are not to be thought of: the talent of well-doing contains
them all.  Every hour will show a duty as paramount as that of my
whim just now; and yet I will write it, -- that there is one topic
peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals,
namely, their distempers.  If you have not slept, or if you have
slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or
thunder-stroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and
not pollute the morning, to which all the housemates bring serene and
pleasant thoughts, by corruption and groans.  Come out of the azure.
Love the day.  Do not leave the sky out of your landscape.  The
oldest and the most deserving person should come very modestly into
any newly awaked company, respecting the divine communications, out
of which all must be presumed to have newly come.  An old man who
added an elevating culture to a large experience of life, said to me,
"When you come into the room, I think I will study how to make
humanity beautiful to you."

        As respects the delicate question of culture, I do not think
that any other than negative rules can be laid down.  For positive
rules, for suggestion, Nature alone inspires it.  Who dare assume to
guide a youth, a maid, to perfect manners? -- the golden mean is so
delicate, difficult, -- say frankly, unattainable.  What finest hands
would not be clumsy to sketch the genial precepts of the young girl's
demeanor?  The chances seem infinite against success; and yet success
is continually attained.  There must not be secondariness, and 'tis a
thousand to one that her air and manner will at once betray that she
is not primary, but that there is some other one or many of her
class, to whom she habitually postpones herself.  But Nature lifts
her easily, and without knowing it, over these impossibilities, and
we are continually surprised with graces and felicities not only
unteachable, but undescribable.

        VI
 
        WORSHIP
 
        This is he, who, felled by foes,
        Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows:
        He to captivity was sold,
        But him no prison-bars would hold:
        Though they sealed him in a rock,
        Mountain chains he can unlock:
        Thrown to lions for their meat,
        The crouching lion kissed his feet:
        Bound to the stake, no flames appalled,
        But arched o'er him an honoring vault.
        This is he men miscall Fate,
        Threading dark ways, arriving late,
        But ever coming in time to crown
        The truth, and hurl wrongdoers down.
        He is the oldest, and best known,
        More near than aught thou call'st thy own,
        Yet, greeted in another's eyes,
        Disconcerts with glad surprise.
        This is Jove, who, deaf to prayers,
        Floods with blessings unawares.
        Draw, if thou canst, the mystic line,
        Severing rightly his from thine,
        Which is human, which divine.

 
        _Worship_

        Some of my friends have complained, when the preceding papers
were read, that we discussed Fate, Power, and Wealth, on too low a
platform; gave too much line to the evil spirit of the times; too
many cakes to Cerberus; that we ran Cudworth's risk of making, by
excess of candor, the argument of atheism so strong, that he could
not answer it.  I have no fears of being forced in my own despite to
play, as we say, the devil's attorney.  I have no infirmity of faith;
no belief that it is of much importance what I or any man may say: I
am sure that a certain truth will be said through me, though I should
be dumb, or though I should try to say the reverse.  Nor do I fear
skepticism for any good soul.  A just thinker will allow full swing
to his skepticism.  I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am
not afraid of falling into my inkpot.  I have no sympathy with a poor
man I knew, who, when suicides abounded, told me he dared not look at
his razor.  We are of different opinions at different hours, but we
always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

        I see not why we should give ourselves such sanctified airs.
If the Divine Providence has hid from men neither disease, nor
deformity, nor corrupt society, but has stated itself out in
passions, in war, in trade, in the love of power and pleasure, in
hunger and need, in tyrannies, literatures, and arts, -- let us not
be so nice that we cannot write these facts down coarsely as they
stand, or doubt but there is a counter-statement as ponderous, which
we can arrive at, and which, being put, will make all square.  The
solar system has no anxiety about its reputation, and the credit of
truth and honesty is as safe; nor have I any fear that a skeptical
bias can be given by leaning hard on the sides of fate, of practical
power, or of trade, which the doctrine of Faith cannot down-weigh.
The strength of that principle is not measured in ounces and pounds:
it tyrannizes at the centre of Nature.  We may well give skepticism
as much line as we can.  The spirit will return, and fill us.  It
drives the drivers.  It counterbalances any accumulations of power.
 
 
        "Heaven kindly gave our blood a moral flow."
 
        We are born loyal.  The whole creation is made of hooks and
eyes, of bitumen, of sticking-plaster, and whether your community is
made in Jerusalem or in California, of saints or of wreckers, it
coheres in a perfect ball.  Men as naturally make a state, or a
church, as caterpillars a web.  If they were more refined, it would
be less formal, it would be nervous, like that of the Shakers, who,
from long habit of thinking and feeling together, it is said, are
affected in the same way, at the same time, to work and to play, and
as they go with perfect sympathy to their tasks in the field or shop,
so are they inclined for a ride or a journey at the same instant, and
the horses come up with the family carriage unbespoken to the door.

        We are born believing.  A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears
apples.  A self-poise belongs to every particle; and a rectitude to
every mind, and is the Nemesis and protector of every society.  I and
my neighbors have been bred in the notion, that, unless we came soon
to some good church, -- Calvinism, or Behmenism, or Romanism, or
Mormonism, -- there would be a universal thaw and dissolution.  No
Isaiah or Jeremy has arrived.  Nothing can exceed the anarchy that
has followed in our skies.  The stern old faiths have all pulverized.
'Tis a whole population of gentlemen and ladies out in search of
religions.  'Tis as flat anarchy in our ecclesiastic realms, as that
which existed in Massachusetts, in the Revolution, or which prevails
now on the slope of the Rocky Mountains or Pike's Peak.  Yet we make
shift to live.  Men are loyal.  Nature has self-poise in all her
works; certain proportions in which oxygen and azote combine, and,
not less a harmony in faculties, a fitness in the spring and the
regulator.

        The decline of the influence of Calvin, or Fenelon, or Wesley,
or Channing, need give us no uneasiness.  The builder of heaven has
not so ill constructed his creature as that the religion, that is,
the public nature, should fall out: the public and the private
element, like north and south, like inside and outside, like
centrifugal and centripetal, adhere to every soul, and cannot be
subdued, except the soul is dissipated.  God builds his temple in the
heart on the ruins of churches and religions.

 
        In the last chapters, we treated some particulars of the
question of culture.  But the whole state of man is a state of
culture; and its flowering and completion may be described as
Religion, or Worship.  There is always some religion, some hope and
fear extended into the invisible, -- from the blind boding which
nails a horseshoe to the mast or the threshold, up to the song of the
Elders in the Apocalypse.  But the religion cannot rise above the
state of the votary.  Heaven always bears some proportion to earth.
The god of the cannibals will be a cannibal, of the crusaders a
crusader, and of the merchants a merchant.  In all ages, souls out of
time, extraordinary, prophetic, are born, who are rather related to
the system of the world, than to their particular age and locality.
These announce absolute truths, which, with whatever reverence
received, are speedily dragged down into a savage interpretation.
The interior tribes of our Indians, and some of the Pacific
islanders, flog their gods, when things take an unfavorable turn.
The Greek poets did not hesitate to let loose their petulant wit on
their deities also.  Laomedon, in his anger at Neptune and Apollo,
who had built Troy for him, and demanded their price, does not
hesitate to menace them that he will cut their ears off.  (*) Among
our Norse forefathers, King Olaf's mode of converting Eyvind to
Christianity was to put a pan of glowing coals on his belly, which
burst asunder.  "Wilt thou now, Eyvind, believe in Christ?" asks
Olaf, in excellent faith.  Another argument was an adder put into the
mouth of the reluctant disciple Rand, who refused to believe.

        (*) Iliad, Book xxi. l. 455.

        Christianity, in the romantic ages, signified European culture,
-- the grafted or meliorated tree in a crab forest.  And to marry a
pagan wife or husband, was to marry Beast, and voluntarily to take a
step backwards towards the baboon.
 
        "Hengist had verament
        A daughter both fair and gent,
        But she was heathen Sarazine,
        And Vortigern for love fine
        Her took to fere and to wife,
        And was cursed in all his life;
        For he let Christian wed heathen,
        And mixed our blood as flesh and worms."

        What Gothic mixtures the Christian creed drew from the pagan
sources, Richard of Devizes's chronicle of Richard I.'s crusade, in
the twelfth century, may show.  King Richard taunts God with
forsaking him: "O fie!  O how unwilling should I be to forsake thee,
in so forlorn and dreadful a position, were I thy lord and advocate,
as thou art mine.  In sooth, my standards will in future be despised,
not through my fault, but through thine: in sooth, not through any
cowardice of my warfare, art thou thyself, my king and my God
conquered, this day, and not Richard thy vassal." The religion of the
early English poets is anomalous, so devout and so blasphemous, in
the same breath.  Such is Chaucer's extraordinary confusion of heaven
and earth in the picture of Dido.

        "She was so fair,
        So young, so lusty, with her eyen glad,
        That if that God that heaven and earthe made
        Would have a love for beauty and goodness,
        And womanhede, truth, and seemliness,
        Whom should he loven but this lady sweet?
        There n' is no woman to him half so meet."

        With these grossnesses, we complacently compare our own taste
and decorum.  We think and speak with more temperance and gradation,
-- but is not indifferentism as bad as superstition?

        We live in a transition period, when the old faiths which
comforted nations, and not only so, but made nations, seem to have
spent their force.  I do not find the religions of men at this moment
very creditable to them, but either childish and insignificant, or
unmanly and effeminating.  The fatal trait is the divorce between
religion and morality.  Here are know-nothing religions, or churches
that proscribe intellect; scortatory religions; slave-holding and
slave-trading religions; and, even in the decent populations,
idolatries wherein the whiteness of the ritual covers scarlet
indulgence.  The lover of the old religion complains that our
contemporaries, scholars as well as merchants, succumb to a great
despair, -- have corrupted into a timorous conservatism, and believe
in nothing.  In our large cities, the population is godless,
materialized, -- no bond, no fellow-feeling, no enthusiasm.  These
are not men, but hungers, thirsts, fevers, and appetites walking.
How is it people manage to live on, -- so aimless as they are?  After
their peppercorn aims are gained, it seems as if the lime in their
bones alone held them together, and not any worthy purpose.  There is
no faith in the intellectual, none in the moral universe.  There is
faith in chemistry, in meat, and wine, in wealth, in machinery, in
the steam-engine, galvanic battery, turbine-wheels, sewing machines,
and in public opinion, but not in divine causes.  A silent revolution
has loosed the tension of the old religious sects, and, in place of
the gravity and permanence of those societies of opinion, they run
into freak and extravagance.  In creeds never was such levity;
witness the heathenisms in Christianity, the periodic "revivals," the
Millennium mathematics, the peacock ritualism, the retrogression to
Popery, the maundering of Mormons, the squalor of Mesmerism, the
deliration of rappings, the rat and mouse revelation, thumps in
table-drawers, and black art.  The architecture, the music, the
prayer, partake of the madness: the arts sink into shift and
make-believe.  Not knowing what to do, we ape our ancestors; the
churches stagger backward to the mummeries of the dark ages.  By the
irresistible maturing of the general mind, the Christian traditions
have lost their hold.  The dogma of the mystic offices of Christ
being dropped, and he standing on his genius as a moral teacher, 'tis
impossible to maintain the old emphasis of his personality; and it
recedes, as all persons must, before the sublimity of the moral laws.
From this change, and in the momentary absence of any religious
genius that could offset the immense material activity, there is a
feeling that religion is gone.  When Paul Leroux offered his article
_"Dieu"_ to the conductor of a leading French journal, he replied,
_"La question de Dieu manque d'actualite."_ In Italy, Mr. Gladstone
said of the late King of Naples, "it has been a proverb, that he has
erected the negation of God into a system of government." In this
country, the like stupefaction was in the air, and the phrase "higher
law" became a political jibe.  What proof of infidelity, like the
toleration and propagandism of slavery?  What, like the direction of
education?  What, like the facility of conversion?  What, like the
externality of churches that once sucked the roots of right and
wrong, and now have perished away till they are a speck of whitewash
on the wall?  What proof of skepticism like the base rate at which
the highest mental and moral gifts are held?  Let a man attain the
highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then
let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, and
all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him;
that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of
America, that the best use to put a fine person to, is, to drown him
to save his board.

        Another scar of this skepticism is the distrust in human
virtue.  It is believed by well-dressed proprietors that there is no
more virtue than they possess; that the solid portion of society
exist for the arts of comfort: that life is an affair to put somewhat
between the upper and lower mandibles.  How prompt the suggestion of
a low motive!  Certain patriots in England devoted themselves for
years to creating a public opinion that should break down the
corn-laws and establish free trade.  `Well,' says the man in the
street, `Cobden got a stipend out of it.' Kossuth fled hither across
the ocean to try if he could rouse the New World to a sympathy with
European liberty.  `Aye,' says New York, `he made a handsome thing of
it, enough to make him comfortable for life.'

        See what allowance vice finds in the respectable and
well-conditioned class.  If a pickpocket intrude into the society of
gentlemen, they exert what moral force they have, and he finds
himself uncomfortable, and glad to get away.  But if an adventurer go
through all the forms, procure himself to be elected to a post of
trust, as of senator, or president, -- though by the same arts as we
detest in the house-thief, -- the same gentlemen who agree to
discountenance the private rogue, will be forward to show civilities
and marks of respect to the public one: and no amount of evidence of
his crimes will prevent them giving him ovations, complimentary
dinners, opening their own houses to him, and priding themselves on
his acquaintance.  We were not deceived by the professions of the
private adventurer, -- the louder he talked of his honor, the faster
we counted our spoons; but we appeal to the sanctified preamble of
the messages and proclamations of the public sinner, as the proof of
sincerity.  It must be that they who pay this homage have said to
themselves, On the whole, we don't know about this that you call
honesty; a bird in the hand is better.

        Even well-disposed, good sort of people are touched with the
same infidelity, and for brave, straightforward action, use
half-measures and compromises.  Forgetful that a little measure is a
great error, forgetful that a wise mechanic uses a sharp tool, they
go on choosing the dead men of routine.  But the official men can in
nowise help you in any question of to-day, they deriving entirely
from the old dead things.  Only those can help in counsel or conduct
who did not make a party pledge to defend this or that, but who were
appointed by God Almighty, before they came into the world, to stand
for this which they uphold.

        It has been charged that a want of sincerity in the leading men
is a vice general throughout American society.  But the multitude of
the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.  In spite of
our imbecility and terrors, and "universal decay of religion," &c.
&c., the moral sense reappears to-day with the same morning newness
that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength.  You
say, there is no religion now.  'Tis like saying in rainy weather,
there is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of his
superlative effects.  The religion of the cultivated class now, to be
sure, consists in an avoidance of acts and engagements which it was
once their religion to assume.  But this avoidance will yield
spontaneous forms in their due hour.  There is a principle which is
the basis of things, which all speech aims to say, and all action to
evolve, a simple, quiet, undescribed, undescribable presence,
dwelling very peacefully in us, our rightful lord: we are not to do,
but to let do; not to work, but to be worked upon; and to this homage
there is a consent of all thoughtful and just men in all ages and
conditions.  To this sentiment belong vast and sudden enlargements of
power.  'Tis remarkable that our faith in ecstasy consists with total
inexperience of it.  It is the order of the world to educate with
accuracy the senses and the understanding; and the enginery at work
to draw out these powers in priority, no doubt, has its office.  But
we are never without a hint that these powers are mediate and
servile, and that we are one day to deal with real being, -- essences
with essences.  Even the fury of material activity has some results
friendly to moral health.  The energetic action of the times develops
individualism, and the religious appear isolated.  I esteem this a
step in the right direction.  Heaven deals with us on no
representative system.  Souls are not saved in bundles.  The Spirit
saith to the man, `How is it with thee? thee personally? is it well?
is it ill?' For a great nature, it is a happiness to escape a
religious training, -- religion of character is so apt to be invaded.
Religion must always be a crab fruit: it cannot be grafted and keep
its wild beauty.  "I have seen," said a traveller who had known the
extremes of society, "I have seen human nature in all its forms, it
is everywhere the same, but the wilder it is, the more virtuous."

        We say, the old forms of religion decay, and that a skepticism
devastates the community.  I do not think it can be cured or stayed
by any modification of theologic creeds, much less by theologic
discipline.  The cure for false theology is motherwit.  Forget your
books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.
That which is signified by the words "moral" and "spiritual," is a
lasting essence, and, with whatever illusions we have loaded them,
will certainly bring back the words, age after age, to their ancient
meaning.  I know no words that mean so much.  In our definitions, we
grope after the _spiritual_ by describing it as invisible.  The true
meaning of _spiritual_ is _real_; that law which executes itself,
which works without means, and which cannot be conceived as not
existing.  Men talk of "mere morality," -- which is much as if one
should say, `poor God, with nobody to help him.' I find the
omnipresence and the almightiness in the reaction of every atom in
Nature.  I can best indicate by examples those reactions by which
every part of Nature replies to the purpose of the actor, --
beneficently to the good, penally to the bad.  Let us replace
sentimentalism by realism, and dare to uncover those simple and
terrible laws which, be they seen or unseen, pervade and govern.

        Every man takes care that his neighbor shall not cheat him.
But a day comes when he begins to care that he do not cheat his
neighbor.  Then all goes well.  He has changed his market-cart into a
chariot of the sun.  What a day dawns, when we have taken to heart
the doctrine of faith! to prefer, as a better investment, being to
doing; being to seeming; logic to rhythm and to display; the year to
the day; the life to the year; character to performance; -- and have
come to know, that justice will be done us; and, if our genius is
slow, the term will be long.

        'Tis certain that worship stands in some commanding relation to
the health of man, and to his highest powers, so as to be, in some
manner, the source of intellect.  All the great ages have been ages
of belief.  I mean, when there was any extraordinary power of
performance, when great national movements began, when arts appeared,
when heroes existed, when poems were made, the human soul was in
earnest, and had fixed its thoughts on spiritual verities, with as
strict a grasp as that of the hands on the sword, or the pencil, or
the trowel.  It is true that genius takes its rise out of the
mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet,
are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary
degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.  Thus, I
think, we very slowly admit in another man a higher degree of moral
sentiment than our own, -- a finer conscience, more impressionable,
or, which marks minuter degrees; an ear to hear acuter notes of right
and wrong, than we can.  I think we listen suspiciously and very
slowly to any evidence to that point.  But, once satisfied of such
superiority, we set no limit to our expectation of his genius.  For
such persons are nearer to the secret of God than others; are bathed
by sweeter waters; they hear notices, they see visions, where others
are vacant.  We believe that holiness confers a certain insight,
because not by our private, but by our public force, can we share and
know the nature of things.

        There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and morals.
Given the equality of two intellects, -- which will form the most
reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted?  "The heart has its
arguments, with which the understanding is not acquainted." For the
heart is at once aware of the state of health or disease, which is
the controlling state, that is, of sanity or of insanity, prior, of
course, to all question of the ingenuity of arguments, the amount of
facts, or the elegance of rhetoric.  So intimate is this alliance of
mind and heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character.  The bias
of errors of principle carries away men into perilous courses, as
soon as their will does not control their passion or talent.  Hence
the extraordinary blunders, and final wrong head, into which men
spoiled by ambition usually fall.  Hence the remedy for all blunders,
the cure of blindness, the cure of crime, is love.  "As much love, so
much mind," said the Latin proverb.  The superiority that has no
superior; the redeemer and instructor of souls, as it is their primal
essence, is love.

        The moral must be the measure of health.  If your eye is on the
eternal, your intellect will grow, and your opinions and actions will
have a beauty which no learning or combined advantages of other men
can rival.  The moment of your loss of faith, and acceptance of the
lucrative standard, will be marked in the pause, or solstice of
genius, the sequent retrogression, and the inevitable loss of
attraction to other minds.  The vulgar are sensible of the change in
you, and of your descent, though they clap you on the back, and
congratulate you on your increased common sense.

        Our recent culture has been in natural science.  We have
learned the manners of the sun and of the moon, of the rivers and the
rains, of the mineral and elemental kingdoms, of plants and animals.
Man has learned to weigh the sun, and its weight neither loses nor
gains.  The path of a star, the moment of an eclipse, can be
determined to the fraction of a second.  Well, to him the book of
history, the book of love, the lures of passion, and the commandments
of duty are opened: and the next lesson taught, is, the continuation
of the inflexible law of matter into the subtile kingdom of will, and
of thought; that, if, in sidereal ages, gravity and projection keep
their craft, and the ball never loses its way in its wild path
through space, -- a secreter gravitation, a secreter projection, rule
not less tyrannically in human history, and keep the balance of power
from age to age unbroken.  For, though the new element of freedom and
an individual has been admitted, yet the primordial atoms are
prefigured and predetermined to moral issues, are in search of
justice, and ultimate right is done.  Religion or worship is the
attitude of those who see this unity, intimacy, and sincerity; who
see that, against all appearances, the nature of things works for
truth and right forever.

        'Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of
gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.  Those laws do not
stop where our eyes lose them, but push the same geometry and
chemistry up into the invisible plane of social and rational life, so
that, look where we will, in a boy's game, or in the strifes of
races, a perfect reaction, a perpetual judgment keeps watch and ward.
And this appears in a class of facts which concerns all men, within
and above their creeds.

        Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: It was
somebody's name, or he happened to be there at the time, or, it was
so then, and another day it would have been otherwise.  Strong men
believe in cause and effect.  The man was born to do it, and his
father was born to be the father of him and of this deed, and, by
looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but
it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.
The curve of the flight of the moth is preordained, and all things go
by number, rule, and weight.

        Skepticism is unbelief in cause and effect.  A man does not
see, that, as he eats, so he thinks: as he deals, so he is, and so he
appears; he does not see, that his son is the son of his thoughts and
of his actions; that fortunes are not exceptions but fruits; that
relation and connection are not somewhere and sometimes, but
everywhere and always; no miscellany, no exemption, no anomaly, --
but method, and an even web; and what comes out, that was put in.  As
we are, so we do; and as we do, so is it done to us; we are the
builders of our fortunes; cant and lying and the attempt to secure a
good which does not belong to us, are, once for all, balked and vain.
But, in the human mind, this tie of fate is made alive.  The law is
the basis of the human mind.  In us, it is inspiration; out there in
Nature, we see its fatal strength.  We call it the moral sentiment.

        We owe to the Hindoo Scriptures a definition of Law, which
compares well with any in our Western books.  "Law it is, which is
without name, or color, or hands, or feet; which is smallest of the
least, and largest of the large; all, and knowing all things; which
hears without ears, sees without eyes, moves without feet, and seizes
without hands."

        If any reader tax me with using vague and traditional phrases,
let me suggest to him, by a few examples, what kind of a trust this
is, and how real.  Let me show him that the dice are loaded; that the
colors are fast, because they are the native colors of the fleece;
that the globe is a battery, because every atom is a magnet; and that
the police and sincerity of the Universe are secured by God's
delegating his divinity to every particle; that there is no room for
hypocrisy, no margin for choice.

        The countryman leaving his native village, for the first time,
and going abroad, finds all his habits broken up.  In a new nation
and language, his sect, as Quaker, or Lutheran, is lost.  What! it is
not then necessary to the order and existence of society?  He misses
this, and the commanding eye of his neighborhood, which held him to
decorum.  This is the peril of New York, of New Orleans, of London,
of Paris, to young men.  But after a little experience, he makes the
discovery that there are no large cities, -- none large enough to
hide in; that the censors of action are as numerous and as near in
Paris, as in Littleton or Portland; that the gossip is as prompt and
vengeful.  There is no concealment, and, for each offence, a several
vengeance; that, reaction, or _nothing for nothing_, or, _things are
as broad as they are long_, is not a rule for Littleton or Portland,
but for the Universe.

        We cannot spare the coarsest muniment of virtue.  We are
disgusted by gossip; yet it is of importance to keep the angels in
their proprieties.  The smallest fly will draw blood, and gossip is a
weapon impossible to exclude from the privatest, highest, selectest.
Nature created a police of many ranks.  God has delegated himself to
a million deputies.  From these low external penalties, the scale
ascends.  Next come the resentments, the fears, which injustice calls
out; then, the false relations in which the offender is put to other
men; and the reaction of his fault on himself, in the solitude and
devastation of his mind.

        You cannot hide any secret.  If the artist succor his flagging
spirits by opium or wine, his work will characterize itself as the
effect of opium or wine.  If you make a picture or a statue, it sets
the beholder in that state of mind you had, when you made it.  If you
spend for show, on building, or gardening, or on pictures, or on
equipages, it will so appear.  We are all physiognomists and
penetrators of character, and things themselves are detective.  If
you follow the suburban fashion in building a sumptuous-looking house
for a little money, it will appear to all eyes as a cheap dear house.
There is no privacy that cannot be penetrated.  No secret can be kept
in the civilized world.  Society is a masked ball, where every one
hides his real character, and reveals it by hiding.  If a man wish to
conceal anything he carries, those whom he meets know that he
conceals somewhat, and usually know what he conceals.  Is it
otherwise if there be some belief or some purpose he would bury in
his breast?  'Tis as hard to hide as fire.  He is a strong man who
can hold down his opinion.  A man cannot utter two or three
sentences, without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he
stands in life and thought, namely, whether in the kingdom of the
senses and the understanding, or, in that of ideas and imagination,
in the realm of intuitions and duty.  People seem not to see that
their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.  We can
only see what we are, and if we misbehave we suspect others.  The
fame of Shakspeare or of Voltaire, of Thomas a Kempis, or of
Bonaparte, characterizes those who give it.  As gas-light is found to
be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by
pitiless publicity.

        Each must be armed -- not necessarily with musket and pike.
Happy, if, seeing these, he can feel that he has better muskets and
pikes in his energy and constancy.  To every creature is his own
weapon, however skilfully concealed from himself, a good while.  His
work is sword and shield.  Let him accuse none, let him injure none.
The way to mend the bad world, is to create the right world.  Here is
a low political economy plotting to cut the throat of foreign
competition, and establish our own; -- excluding others by force, or
making war on them; or, by cunning tariffs, giving preference to
worse wares of ours.  But the real and lasting victories are those of
peace, and not of war.  The way to conquer the foreign artisan, is,
not to kill him, but to beat his work.  And the Crystal Palaces and
World Fairs, with their committees and prizes on all kinds of
industry, are the result of this feeling.  The American workman who
strikes ten blows with his hammer, whilst the foreign workman only
strikes one, is as really vanquishing that foreigner, as if the blows
were aimed at and told on his person.  I look on that man as happy,
who, when there is question of success, looks into his work for a
reply, not into the market, not into opinion, not into patronage.  In
every variety of human employment, in the mechanical and in the fine
arts, in navigation, in farming, in legislating, there are among the
numbers who do their task perfunctorily, as we say, or just to pass,
and as badly as they dare, -- there are the working-men, on whom the
burden of the business falls, -- those who love work, and love to see
it rightly done, who finish their task for its own sake; and the
state and the world is happy, that has the most of such finishers.
The world will always do justice at last to such finishers: it cannot
otherwise.  He who has acquired the ability, may wait securely the
occasion of making it felt and appreciated, and know that it will not
loiter.  Men talk as if victory were something fortunate.  Work is
victory.  Wherever work is done, victory is obtained.  There is no
chance, and no blanks.  You want but one verdict: if you have your
own, you are secure of the rest.  And yet, if witnesses are wanted,
witnesses are near.  There was never a man born so wise or good, but
one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in
his faculty, and report it.  I cannot see without awe, that no man
thinks alone, and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who
came up with him into life, -- now under one disguise, now under
another, -- like a police in citizens' clothes, walk with him, step
for step, through all the kingdom of time.

        This reaction, this sincerity is the property of all things.
To make our word or act sublime, we must make it real.  It is our
system that counts, not the single word or unsupported action.  Use
what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.
What I am, and what I think, is conveyed to you, in spite of my
efforts to hold it back.  What I am has been secretly conveyed from
me to another, whilst I was vainly making up my mind to tell him it.
He has heard from me what I never spoke.

        As men get on in life, they acquire a love for sincerity, and
somewhat less solicitude to be lulled or amused.  In the progress of
the character, there is an increasing faith in the moral sentiment,
and a decreasing faith in propositions.  Young people admire talents,
and particular excellences.  As we grow older, we value total powers
and effects, as the spirit, or quality of the man.  We have another
sight, and a new standard; an insight which disregards what is done
_for_ the eye, and pierces to the doer; an ear which hears not what
men say, but hears what they do not say.

        There was a wise, devout man who is called, in the Catholic
Church, St. Philip Neri, of whom many anecdotes touching his
discernment and benevolence are told at Naples and Rome.  Among the
nuns in a convent not far from Rome, one had appeared, who laid claim
to certain rare gifts of inspiration and prophecy, and the abbess
advised the Holy Father, at Rome, of the wonderful powers shown by
her novice.  The Pope did not well know what to make of these new
claims, and Philip coming in from a journey, one day, he consulted
him.  Philip undertook to visit the nun, and ascertain her character.
He threw himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he was, and
hastened through the mud and mire to the distant convent.  He told
the abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her to summon the
nun without delay.  The nun was sent for, and, as soon as she came
into the apartment, Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with
mud, and desired her to draw off his boots.  The young nun, who had
become the object of much attention and respect, drew back with
anger, and refused the office: Philip ran out of doors, mounted his
mule, and returned instantly to the Pope; "Give yourself no
uneasiness, Holy Father, any longer: here is no miracle, for here is
no humility."

        We need not much mind what people please to say, but what they
must say; what their natures say, though their busy, artful, Yankee
understandings try to hold back, and choke that word, and to
articulate something different.  If we will sit quietly, -- what they
ought to say is said, with their will, or against their will.  We do
not care for you, let us pretend what we will: -- we are always
looking through you to the dim dictator behind you.  Whilst your
habit or whim chatters, we civilly and impatiently wait until that
wise superior shall speak again.  Even children are not deceived by
the false reasons which their parents give in answer to their
questions, whether touching natural facts, or religion, or persons.
When the parent, instead of thinking how it really is, puts them off
with a traditional or a hypocritical answer, the children perceive
that it is traditional or hypocritical.  To a sound constitution the
defect of another is at once manifest: and the marks of it are only
concealed from us by our own dislocation.  An anatomical observer
remarks, that the sympathies of the chest, abdomen, and pelvis, tell
at last on the face, and on all its features.  Not only does our
beauty waste, but it leaves word how it went to waste.  Physiognomy
and phrenology are not new sciences, but declarations of the soul
that it is aware of certain new sources of information.  And now
sciences of broader scope are starting up behind these.  And so for
ourselves, it is really of little importance what blunders in
statement we make, so only we make no wilful departures from the
truth.  How a man's truth comes to mind, long after we have forgotten
all his words!  How it comes to us in silent hours, that truth is our
only armor in all passages of life and death!  Wit is cheap, and
anger is cheap; but if you cannot argue or explain yourself to the
other party, cleave to the truth against me, against thee, and you
gain a station from which you cannot be dislodged.  The other party
will forget the words that you spoke, but the part you took continues
to plead for you.

        Why should I hasten to solve every riddle which life offers me?
I am well assured that the Questioner, who brings me so many
problems, will bring the answers also in due time.  Very rich, very
potent, very cheerful Giver that he is, he shall have it all his own
way, for me.  Why should I give up my thought, because I cannot
answer an objection to it?  Consider only, whether it remains in my
life the same it was.  That only which we have within, can we see
without.  If we meet no gods, it is because we harbor none.  If there
is grandeur in you, you will find grandeur in porters and sweeps.  He
only is rightly immortal, to whom all things are immortal.  I have
read somewhere, that none is accomplished, so long as any are
incomplete; that the happiness of one cannot consist with the misery
of any other.

        The Buddhists say, "No seed will die:" every seed will grow.
Where is the service which can escape its remuneration?  What is
vulgar, and the essence of all vulgarity, but the avarice of reward?
'Tis the difference of artisan and artist, of talent and genius, of
sinner and saint.  The man whose eyes are nailed not on the nature of
his act, but on the wages, whether it be money, or office, or fame,
-- is almost equally low.  He is great, whose eyes are opened to see
that the reward of actions cannot be escaped, because he is
transformed into his action, and taketh its nature, which bears its
own fruit, like every other tree.  A great man cannot be hindered of
the effect of his act, because it is immediate.  The genius of life
is friendly to the noble, and in the dark brings them friends from
far.  Fear God, and where you go, men shall think they walk in
hallowed cathedrals.

        And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the
human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of
Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right,
assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and
his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incense exhales from
them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by
the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.

        Thus man is made equal to every event.  He can face danger for
the right.  A poor, tender, painful body, he can run into flame or
bullets or pestilence, with duty for his guide.  He feels the
insurance of a just employment.  I am not afraid of accident, as long
as I am in my place.  It is strange that superior persons should not
feel that they have some better resistance against cholera, than
avoiding green peas and salads.  Life is hardly respectable, -- is
it? if it has no generous, guaranteeing task, no duties or
affections, that constitute a necessity of existing.  Every man's
task is his life-preserver.  The conviction that his work is dear to
God and cannot be spared, defends him.  The lightning-rod that
disarms the cloud of its threat is his body in its duty.  A high aim
reacts on the means, on the days, on the organs of the body.  A high
aim is curative, as well as arnica.  "Napoleon," says Goethe,
"visited those sick of the plague, in order to prove that the man who
could vanquish fear, could vanquish the plague also; and he was
right.  'Tis incredible what force the will has in such cases: it
penetrates the body, and puts it in a state of activity, which repels
all hurtful influences; whilst fear invites them."

        It is related of William of Orange, that, whilst he was
besieging a town on the continent, a gentleman sent to him on public
business came to his camp, and, learning that the King was before the
walls, he ventured to go where he was.  He found him directing the
operation of his gunners, and, having explained his errand, and
received his answer, the King said, "Do you not know, sir, that every
moment you spend here is at the risk of your life?" "I run no more
risk," replied the gentleman, "than your Majesty." "Yes," said the
King, "but my duty brings me here, and yours does not." In a few
minutes, a cannon-ball fell on the spot, and the gentleman was
killed.

        Thus can the faithful student reverse all the warnings of his
early instinct, under the guidance of a deeper instinct.  He learns
to welcome misfortune, learns that adversity is the prosperity of the
great.  He learns the greatness of humility.  He shall work in the
dark, work against failure, pain, and ill-will.  If he is insulted,
he can be insulted; all his affair is not to insult.  Hafiz writes,

        At the last day, men shall wear
        On their heads the dust,
        As ensign and as ornament
        Of their lowly trust.
 
        The moral equalizes all; enriches, empowers all.  It is the
coin which buys all, and which all find in their pocket.  Under the
whip of the driver, the slave shall feel his equality with saints and
heroes.  In the greatest destitution and calamity, it surprises man
with a feeling of elasticity which makes nothing of loss.

        I recall some traits of a remarkable person whose life and
discourse betrayed many inspirations of this sentiment.  Benedict was
always great in the present time.  He had hoarded nothing from the
past, neither in his cabinets, neither in his memory.  He had no
designs on the future, neither for what he should do to men, nor for
what men should do for him.  He said, `I am never beaten until I know
that I am beaten.  I meet powerful brutal people to whom I have no
skill to reply.  They think they have defeated me.  It is so
published in society, in the journals; I am defeated in this fashion,
in all men's sight, perhaps on a dozen different lines.  My leger may
show that I am in debt, cannot yet make my ends meet, and vanquish
the enemy so.  My race may not be prospering: we are sick, ugly,
obscure, unpopular.  My children may be worsted.  I seem to fail in
my friends and clients, too.  That is to say, in all the encounters
that have yet chanced, I have not been weaponed for that particular
occasion, and have been historically beaten; and yet, I know, all the
time, that I have never been beaten; have never yet fought, shall
certainly fight, when my hour comes, and shall beat.'  "A man," says
the Vishnu Sarma, "who having well compared his own strength or
weakness with that of others, after all doth not know the difference,
is easily overcome by his enemies."

        `I spent,' he said, `ten months in the country.  Thick-starred
Orion was my only companion.  Wherever a squirrel or a bee can go
with security, I can go.  I ate whatever was set before me; I touched
ivy and dogwood.  When I went abroad, I kept company with every man
on the road, for I knew that my evil and my good did not come from
these, but from the Spirit, whose servant I was.  For I could not
stoop to be a circumstance, as they did, who put their life into
their fortune and their company.  I would not degrade myself by
casting about in my memory for a thought, nor by waiting for one.  If
the thought come, I would give it entertainment.  It should, as it
ought, go into my hands and feet; but if it come not spontaneously,
it comes not rightly at all.  If it can spare me, I am sure I can
spare it.  It shall be the same with my friends.  I will never woo
the loveliest.  I will not ask any friendship or favor.  When I come
to my own, we shall both know it.  Nothing will be to be asked or to
be granted.' Benedict went out to seek his friend, and met him on the
way; but he expressed no surprise at any coincidences.  On the other
hand, if he called at the door of his friend, and he was not at home,
he did not go again; concluding that he had misinterpreted the
intimations.

        He had the whim not to make an apology to the same individual
whom he had wronged.  For this, he said, was a piece of personal
vanity; but he would correct his conduct in that respect in which he
had faulted, to the next person he should meet.  Thus, he said,
universal justice was satisfied.

        Mira came to ask what she should do with the poor Genesee woman
who had hired herself to work for her, at a shilling a day, and, now
sickening, was like to be bedridden on her hands.  Should she keep
her, or should she dismiss her?  But Benedict said, `Why ask?  One
thing will clear itself as the thing to be done, and not another,
when the hour comes.  Is it a question, whether to put her into the
street?  Just as much whether to thrust the little Jenny on your arm
into the street.  The milk and meal you give the beggar, will fatten
Jenny.  Thrust the woman out, and you thrust your babe out of doors,
whether it so seem to you or not.'

        In the Shakers, so called, I find one piece of belief, in the
doctrine which they faithfully hold, that encourages them to open
their doors to every wayfaring man who proposes to come among them;
for, they say, the Spirit will presently manifest to the man himself,
and to the society, what manner of person he is, and whether he
belongs among them.  They do not receive him, they do not reject him.
And not in vain have they worn their clay coat, and drudged in their
fields, and shuffled in their Bruin dance, from year to year, if they
have truly learned thus much wisdom.

        Honor him whose life is perpetual victory; him, who, by
sympathy with the invisible and real, finds support in labor, instead
of praise; who does not shine, and would rather not.  With eyes open,
he makes the choice of virtue, which outrages the virtuous; of
religion, which churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate;
for the highest virtue is always against the law.

        Miracle comes to the miraculous, not to the arithmetician.
Talent and success interest me but moderately.  The great class, they
who affect our imagination, the men who could not make their hands
meet around their objects, the rapt, the lost, the fools of ideas, --
they suggest what they cannot execute.  They speak to the ages, and
are heard from afar.  The Spirit does not love cripples and
malformations.  If there ever was a good man, be certain, there was
another, and will be more.

        And so in relation to that future hour, that spectre clothed
with beauty at our curtain by night, at our table by day, -- the
apprehension, the assurance of a coming change.  The race of mankind
have always offered at least this implied thanks for the gift of
existence, -- namely, the terror of its being taken away; the
insatiable curiosity and appetite for its continuation.  The whole
revelation that is vouchsafed us, is, the gentle trust, which, in our
experience we find, will cover also with flowers the slopes of this
chasm.

        Of immortality, the soul, when well employed, is incurious.  It
is so well, that it is sure it will be well.  It asks no questions of
the Supreme Power.  The son of Antiochus asked his father, when he
would join battle?  "Dost thou fear," replied the King, "that thou
only in all the army wilt not hear the trumpet?" 'Tis a higher thing
to confide, that, if it is best we should live, we shall live, --
'tis higher to have this conviction, than to have the lease of
indefinite centuries and millenniums and aeons.  Higher than the
question of our duration is the question of our deserving.
Immortality will come to such as are fit for it, and he who would be
a great soul in future, must be a great soul now.  It is a doctrine
too great to rest on any legend, that is, on any man's experience but
our own.  It must be proved, if at all, from our own activity and
designs, which imply an interminable future for their play.

        What is called religion effeminates and demoralizes.  Such as
you are, the gods themselves could not help you.  Men are too often
unfit to live, from their obvious inequality to their own
necessities, or, they suffer from politics, or bad neighbors, or from
sickness, and they would gladly know that they were to be dismissed
from the duties of life.  But the wise instinct asks, `How will death
help them?' These are not dismissed when they die.  You shall not
wish for death out of pusillanimity.  The weight of the Universe is
pressed down on the shoulders of each moral agent to hold him to his
task.  The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is
performance.  You must do your work, before you shall be released.
And as far as it is a question of fact respecting the government of
the Universe, Marcus Antoninus summed the whole in a word, "It is
pleasant to die, if there be gods; and sad to live, if there be
none."

        And so I think that the last lesson of life, the choral song
which rises from all elements and all angels, is, a voluntary
obedience, a necessitated freedom.  Man is made of the same atoms as
the world is, he shares the same impressions, predispositions, and
destiny.  When his mind is illuminated, when his heart is kind, he
throws himself joyfully into the sublime order, and does, with
knowledge, what the stones do by structure.

        The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and
coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual.  The
scientific mind must have a faith which is science.  "There are two
things," said Mahomet, "which I abhor, the learned in his
infidelities, and the fool in his devotions." Our times are impatient
of both, and specially of the last.  Let us have nothing now which is
not its own evidence.  There is surely enough for the heart and
imagination in the religion itself.  Let us not be pestered with
assertions and half-truths, with emotions and snuffle.

        There will be a new church founded on moral science, at first
cold and naked, a babe in a manger again, the algebra and mathematics
of ethical law, the church of men to come, without shawms, or
psaltery, or sackbut; but it will have heaven and earth for its beams
and rafters; science for symbol and illustration; it will fast enough
gather beauty, music, picture, poetry.  Was never stoicism so stern
and exigent as this shall be.  It shall send man home to his central
solitude, shame these social, supplicating manners, and make him know
that much of the time he must have himself to his friend.  He shall
expect no cooperation, he shall walk with no companion.  The nameless
Thought, the nameless Power, the superpersonal Heart, -- he shall
repose alone on that.  He needs only his own verdict.  No good fame
can help, no bad fame can hurt him.  The Laws are his consolers, the
good Laws themselves are alive, they know if he have kept them, they
animate him with the leading of great duty, and an endless horizon.
Honor and fortune exist to him who always recognizes the neighborhood
of the great, always feels himself in the presence of high causes.

        VII
 
        CONSIDERATIONS BY THE WAY
 
        Hear what British Merlin sung,
        Of keenest eye and truest tongue.
        Say not, the chiefs who first arrive
        Usurp the seats for which all strive;
        The forefathers this land who found
        Failed to plant the vantage-ground;
        Ever from one who comes to-morrow
        Men wait their good and truth to borrow.
        But wilt thou measure all thy road,
        See thou lift the lightest load.
        Who has little, to him who has less, can spare,
        And thou, Cyndyllan's son! beware
        Ponderous gold and stuffs to bear,
        To falter ere thou thy task fulfil, --
        Only the light-armed climb the hill.
        The richest of all lords is Use,
        And ruddy Health the loftiest Muse.
        Live in the sunshine, swim the sea,
        Drink the wild air's salubrity:
        Where the star Canope shines in May,
        Shepherds are thankful, and nations gay.
        The music that can deepest reach,
        And cure all ill, is cordial speech:
 
 
        Mask thy wisdom with delight,
        Toy with the bow, yet hit the white.
        Of all wit's uses, the main one
        Is to live well with who has none.
        Cleave to thine acre; the round year
        Will fetch all fruits and virtues here:
        Fool and foe may harmless roam,
        Loved and lovers bide at home.
        A day for toil, an hour for sport,
        But for a friend is life too short.

 
        _Considerations by the Way_

        Although this garrulity of advising is born with us, I confess
that life is rather a subject of wonder, than of didactics.  So much
fate, so much irresistible dictation from temperament and unknown
inspiration enters into it, that we doubt we can say anything out of
our own experience whereby to help each other.  All the professions
are timid and expectant agencies.  The priest is glad if his prayers
or his sermon meet the condition of any soul; if of two, if of ten,
'tis a signal success.  But he walked to the church without any
assurance that he knew the distemper, or could heal it.  The
physician prescribes hesitatingly out of his few resources, the same
tonic or sedative to this new and peculiar constitution, which he has
applied with various success to a hundred men before.  If the patient
mends, he is glad and surprised.  The lawyer advises the client, and
tells his story to the jury, and leaves it with them, and is as gay
and as much relieved as the client, if it turns out that he has a
verdict.  The judge weighs the arguments, and puts a brave face on
the matter, and, since there must be a decision, decides as he can,
and hopes he has done justice, and given satisfaction to the
community; but is only an advocate after all.  And so is all life a
timid and unskilful spectator.  We do what we must, and call it by
the best names.  We like very well to be praised for our action, but
our conscience says, "Not unto us." 'Tis little we can do for each
other.  We accompany the youth with sympathy, and manifold old
sayings of the wise, to the gate of the arena, but 'tis certain that
not by strength of ours, or of the old sayings, but only on strength
of his own, unknown to us or to any, he must stand or fall.  That by
which a man conquers in any passage, is a profound secret to every
other being in the world, and it is only as he turns his back on us
and on all men, and draws on this most private wisdom, that any good
can come to him.  What we have, therefore, to say of life, is rather
description, or, if you please, celebration, than available rules.

        Yet vigor is contagious, and whatever makes us either think or
feel strongly, adds to our power, and enlarges our field of action.
We have a debt to every great heart, to every fine genius; to those
who have put life and fortune on the cast of an act of justice; to
those who have added new sciences; to those who have refined life by
elegant pursuits.  'Tis the fine souls who serve us, and not what is
called fine society.  Fine society is only a self-protection against
the vulgarities of the street and the tavern.  Fine society, in the
common acceptation, has neither ideas nor aims.  It renders the
service of a perfumery, or a laundry, not of a farm or factory.  'Tis
an exclusion and a precinct.  Sidney Smith said, "A few yards in
London cement or dissolve friendship." It is an unprincipled decorum;
an affair of clean linen and coaches, of gloves, cards, and elegance
in trifles.  There are other measures of self-respect for a man, than
the number of clean shirts he puts on every day.  Society wishes to
be amused.  I do not wish to be amused.  I wish that life should not
be cheap, but sacred.  I wish the days to be as centuries, loaded,
fragrant.  Now we reckon them as bank-days, by some debt which is to
be paid us, or which we are to pay, or some pleasure we are to taste.
Is all we have to do to draw the breath in, and blow it out again?
Porphyry's definition is better; "Life is that which holds matter
together." The babe in arms is a channel through which the energies
we call fate, love, and reason, visibly stream.  See what a cometary
train of auxiliaries man carries with him, of animals, plants,
stones, gases, and imponderable elements.  Let us infer his ends from
this pomp of means.  Mirabeau said, "Why should we feel ourselves to
be men, unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere.  You must
say of nothing, _That is beneath me_, nor feel that anything can be
out of your power.  Nothing is impossible to the man who can will.
_Is that necessary?  That shall be:_ -- this is the only law of
success." Whoever said it, this is in the right key.  But this is not
the tone and genius of the men in the street.  In the streets, we
grow cynical.  The men we meet are coarse and torpid.  The finest
wits have their sediment.  What quantities of fribbles, paupers,
invalids, epicures, antiquaries, politicians, thieves, and triflers
of both sexes, might be advantageously spared!  Mankind divides
itself into two classes,-- benefactors and malefactors.  The second
class is vast, the first a handful.  A person seldom falls sick, but
the bystanders are animated with a faint hope that he will die: --
quantities of poor lives; of distressing invalids; of cases for a
gun.  Franklin said, "Mankind are very superficial and dastardly:
they begin upon a thing, but, meeting with a difficulty, they fly
from it discouraged: but they have capacities, if they would employ
them." Shall we then judge a country by the majority, or by the
minority?  By the minority, surely.  'Tis pedantry to estimate
nations by the census, or by square miles of land, or other than by
their importance to the mind of the time.

        Leave this hypocritical prating about the masses.  Masses are
rude, lame, unmade, pernicious in their demands and influence, and
need not to be flattered but to be schooled.  I wish not to concede
anything to them, but to tame, drill, divide, and break them up, and
draw individuals out of them.  The worst of charity is, that the
lives you are asked to preserve are not worth preserving.  Masses!
the calamity is the masses.  I do not wish any mass at all, but
honest men only, lovely, sweet, accomplished women only, and no
shovel-handed, narrow-brained, gin-drinking million stockingers or
lazzaroni at all.  If government knew how, I should like to see it
check, not multiply the population.  When it reaches its true law of
action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.  Away
with this hurrah of masses, and let us have the considerate vote of
single men spoken on their honor and their conscience.  In old Egypt,
it was established law, that the vote of a prophet be reckoned equal
to a hundred hands.  I think it was much under-estimated.  "Clay and
clay differ in dignity," as we discover by our preferences every day.
What a vicious practice is this of our politicians at Washington
pairing off! as if one man who votes wrong, going away, could excuse
you, who mean to vote right, for going away; or, as if your presence
did not tell in more ways than in your vote.  Suppose the three
hundred heroes at Thermopylae had paired off with three hundred
Persians: would it have been all the same to Greece, and to history?
Napoleon was called by his men _Cent Mille_.  Add honesty to him, and
they might have called him Hundred Million.

        Nature makes fifty poor melons for one that is good, and shakes
down a tree full of gnarled, wormy, unripe crabs, before you can find
a dozen dessert apples; and she scatters nations of naked Indians,
and nations of clothed Christians, with two or three good heads among
them.  Nature works very hard, and only hits the white once in a
million throws.  In mankind, she is contented if she yields one
master in a century.  The more difficulty there is in creating good
men, the more they are used when they come.  I once counted in a
little neighborhood, and found that every able-bodied man had, say
from twelve to fifteen persons dependent on him for material aid, --
to whom he is to be for spoon and jug, for backer and sponsor, for
nursery and hospital, and many functions beside: nor does it seem to
make much difference whether he is bachelor or patriarch; if he do
not violently decline the duties that fall to him, this amount of
helpfulness will in one way or another be brought home to him.  This
is the tax which his abilities pay.  The good men are employed for
private centres of use, and for larger influence.  All revelations,
whether of mechanical or intellectual or moral science, are made not
to communities, but to single persons.  All the marked events of our
day, all the cities, all the colonizations, may be traced back to
their origin in a private brain.  All the feats which make our
civility were the thoughts of a few good heads.

        Meantime, this spawning productivity is not noxious or
needless.  You would say, this rabble of nations might be spared.
But no, they are all counted and depended on.  Fate keeps everything
alive so long as the smallest thread of public necessity holds it on
to the tree.  The coxcomb and bully and thief class are allowed as
proletaries, every one of their vices being the excess or acridity of
a virtue.  The mass are animal, in pupilage, and near chimpanzee.
But the units, whereof this mass is composed are neuters, every one
of which may be grown to a queen-bee.  The rule is, we are used as
brute atoms, until we think: then, we use all the rest.  Nature turns
all malfaisance to good.  Nature provided for real needs.  No sane
man at last distrusts himself.  His existence is a perfect answer to
all sentimental cavils.  If he is, he is wanted, and has the precise
properties that are required.  That we are here, is proof we ought to
be here.  We have as good right, and the same sort of right to be
here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there.

        To say then, the majority are wicked, means no malice, no bad
heart in the observer, but, simply, that the majority are unripe, and
have not yet come to themselves, do not yet know their opinion.
_That_, if they knew it, is an oracle for them and for all.  But in
the passing moment, the quadruped interest is very prone to prevail:
and this beast-force, whilst it makes the discipline of the world,
the school of heroes, the glory of martyrs, has provoked, in every
age, the satire of wits, and the tears of good men.  They find the
journals, the clubs, the governments, the churches, to be in the
interest, and the pay of the devil.  And wise men have met this
obstruction in their times, like Socrates, with his famous irony;
like Bacon, with life-long dissimulation; like Erasmus, with his book
"The Praise of Folly;" like Rabelais, with his satire rending the
nations.  "They were the fools who cried against me, you will say,"
wrote the Chevalier de Boufflers to Grimm; "aye, but the fools have
the advantage of numbers, and 'tis that which decides.  'Tis of no
use for us to make war with them; we shall not weaken them; they will
always be the masters.  There will not be a practice or an usage
introduced, of which they are not the authors."

        In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history
is the good of evil.  Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a
better.  'Tis the oppressions of William the Norman, savage
forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that made possible the
inspirations of _Magna Charta_ under John. Edward I. wanted money,
armies, castles, and as much as he could get.  It was necessary to
call the people together by shorter, swifter ways, -- and the House
of Commons arose.  To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges.  In
the twenty-fourth year of his reign, he decreed, "that no tax should
be levied without consent of Lords and Commons;" -- which is the
basis of the English Constitution.  Plutarch affirms that the cruel
wars which followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility,
language, and arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced
marriage; built seventy cities; and united hostile nations under one
government.  The barbarians who broke up the Roman empire did not
arrive a day too soon.  Schiller says, the Thirty Years' War made
Germany a nation.  Rough, selfish despots serve men immensely, as
Henry VIII.  in the contest with the Pope; as the infatuations no
less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the ferocity of the Russian
czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides of 1789.  The frost
which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests of a century,
by destroying the weevil or the locust.  Wars, fires, plagues, break
up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races and dens of
distemper, and open a fair field to new men.  There is a tendency in
things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or bankruptcy
that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new and
natural order.  The sharpest evils are bent into that periodicity
which makes the errors of planets, and the fevers and distempers of
men, self-limiting.  Nature is upheld by antagonism.  Passions,
resistance, danger, are educators.  We acquire the strength we have
overcome.  Without war, no soldier; without enemies, no hero.  The
sun were insipid, if the universe were not opaque.  And the glory of
character is in affronting the horrors of depravity, to draw thence
new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and
combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker
pits of night.  What would painter do, or what would poet or saint,
but for crucifixions and hells?  And evermore in the world is this
marvellous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.  Not
Antoninus, but a poor washer-woman said, "The more trouble, the more
lion; that's my principle."

        I do not think very respectfully of the designs or the doings
of the people who went to California, in 1849.  It was a rush and a
scramble of needy adventurers, and, in the western country, a general
jail-delivery of all the rowdies of the rivers.  Some of them went
with honest purposes, some with very bad ones, and all of them with
the very commonplace wish to find a short way to wealth.  But Nature
watches over all, and turns this malfaisance to good.  California
gets peopled and subdued, -- civilized in this immoral way, -- and,
on this fiction, a real prosperity is rooted and grown.  'Tis a
decoy-duck; 'tis tubs thrown to amuse the whale: but real ducks, and
whales that yield oil, are caught.  And, out of Sabine rapes, and out
of robbers' forays, real Romes and their heroisms come in fulness of
time.

        In America, the geography is sublime, but the men are not: the
inventions are excellent, but the inventors one is sometimes ashamed
of.  The agencies by which events so grand as the opening of
California, of Texas, of Oregon, and the junction of the two oceans,
are effected, are paltry, -- coarse selfishness, fraud, and
conspiracy: and most of the great results of history are brought
about by discreditable means.

        The benefaction derived in Illinois, and the great West, from
railroads is inestimable, and vastly exceeding any intentional
philanthropy on record.  What is the benefit done by a good King
Alfred, or by a Howard, or Pestalozzi, or Elizabeth Fry, or Florence
Nightingale, or any lover, less or larger, compared with the
involuntary blessing wrought on nations by the selfish capitalists
who built the Illinois, Michigan, and the network of the Mississippi
valley roads, which have evoked not only all the wealth of the soil,
but the energy of millions of men.  'Tis a sentence of ancient
wisdom, "that God hangs the greatest weights on the smallest wires."

        What happens thus to nations, befalls every day in private
houses.  When the friends of a gentleman brought to his notice the
follies of his sons, with many hints of their danger, he replied,
that he knew so much mischief when he was a boy, and had turned out
on the whole so successfully, that he was not alarmed by the
dissipation of boys; 'twas dangerous water, but, he thought, they
would soon touch bottom, and then swim to the top.  This is bold
practice, and there are many failures to a good escape.  Yet one
would say, that a good understanding would suffice as well as moral
sensibility to keep one erect; the gratifications of the passions are
so quickly seen to be damaging, and, -- what men like least, --
seriously lowering them in social rank.  Then all talent sinks with
character.

        _"Croyez moi, l'erreur aussi a son merite,"_ said Voltaire.  We
see those who surmount, by dint of some egotism or infatuation,
obstacles from which the prudent recoil.  The right partisan is a
heady narrow man, who, because he does not see many things, sees some
one thing with heat and exaggeration, and, if he falls among other
narrow men, or on objects which have a brief importance, as some
trade or politics of the hour, he prefers it to the universe, and
seems inspired, and a godsend to those who wish to magnify the
matter, and carry a point.  Better, certainly, if we could secure the
strength and fire which rude, passionate men bring into society,
quite clear of their vices.  But who dares draw out the linchpin from
the wagon-wheel?  'Tis so manifest, that there is no moral deformity,
but is a good passion out of place; that there is no man who is not
indebted to his foibles; that, according to the old oracle, "the
Furies are the bonds of men;" that the poisons are our principal
medicines, which kill the disease, and save the life.  In the high
prophetic phrase, _He causes the wrath of man to praise him_, and
twists and wrenches our evil to our good.  Shakspeare wrote, --

        "'Tis said, best men are moulded of their faults;"

        and great educators and lawgivers, and especially generals, and
leaders of colonies, mainly rely on this stuff, and esteem men of
irregular and passional force the best timber.  A man of sense and
energy, the late head of the Farm School in Boston harbor, said to
me, "I want none of your good boys, -- give me the bad ones." And
this is the reason, I suppose, why, as soon as the children are good,
the mothers are scared, and think they are going to die.  Mirabeau
said, "There are none but men of strong passions capable of going to
greatness; none but such capable of meriting the public gratitude."
Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.  Any absorbing
passion has the effect to deliver from the little coils and cares of
every day: 'tis the heat which sets our human atoms spinning,
overcomes the friction of crossing thresholds, and first addresses in
society, and gives us a good start and speed, easy to continue, when
once it is begun.  In short, there is no man who is not at some time
indebted to his vices, as no plant that is not fed from manures.  We
only insist that the man meliorate, and that the plant grow upward,
and convert the base into the better nature.

        The wise workman will not regret the poverty or the solitude
which brought out his working talents.  The youth is charmed with the
fine air and accomplishments of the children of fortune.  But all
great men come out of the middle classes.  'Tis better for the head;
'tis better for the heart.  Marcus Antoninus says, that Fronto told
him, "that the so-called high-born are for the most part heartless;"
whilst nothing is so indicative of deepest culture as a tender
consideration of the ignorant.  Charles James Fox said of England,
"The history of this country proves, that we are not to expect from
men in affluent circumstances the vigilance, energy, and exertion
without which the House of Commons would lose its greatest force and
weight.  Human nature is prone to indulgence, and the most
meritorious public services have always been performed by persons in
a condition of life removed from opulence." And yet what we ask
daily, is to be conventional.  Supply, most kind gods! this defect in
my address, in my form, in my fortunes, which puts me a little out of
the ring: supply it, and let me be like the rest whom I admire, and
on good terms with them.  But the wise gods say, No, we have better
things for thee.  By humiliations, by defeats, by loss of sympathy,
by gulfs of disparity, learn a wider truth and humanity than that of
a fine gentleman.  A Fifth-Avenue landlord, a West-End householder,
is not the highest style of man: and, though good hearts and sound
minds are of no condition, yet he who is to be wise for many, must
not be protected.  He must know the huts where poor men lie, and the
chores which poor men do.  The first-class minds, Aesop, Socrates,
Cervantes, Shakspeare, Franklin, had the poor man's feeling and
mortification.  A rich man was never insulted in his life: but this
man must be stung.  A rich man was never in danger from cold, or
hunger, or war, or ruffians, and you can see he was not, from the
moderation of his ideas.  'Tis a fatal disadvantage to be cockered,
and to eat too much cake.  What tests of manhood could he stand?
Take him out of his protections.  He is a good book-keeper; or he is
a shrewd adviser in the insurance office: perhaps he could pass a
college examination, and take his degrees: perhaps he can give wise
counsel in a court of law.  Now plant him down among farmers,
firemen, Indians, and emigrants.  Set a dog on him: set a highwayman
on him: try him with a course of mobs: send him to Kansas, to Pike's
Peak, to Oregon: and, if he have true faculty, this may be the
element he wants, and he will come out of it with broader wisdom and
manly power.  Aesop, Saadi, Cervantes, Regnard, have been taken by
corsairs, left for dead, sold for slaves, and know the realities of
human life.

        Bad times have a scientific value.  These are occasions a good
learner would not miss.  As we go gladly to Faneuil Hall, to be
played upon by the stormy winds and strong fingers of enraged
patriotism, so is a fanatical persecution, civil war, national
bankruptcy, or revolution, more rich in the central tones than
languid years of prosperity.  What had been, ever since our memory,
solid continent, yawns apart, and discloses its composition and
genesis.  We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on
ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry
bed of the sea.

        In our life and culture, everything is worked up, and comes in
use, -- passion, war, revolt, bankruptcy, and not less, folly and
blunders, insult, ennui, and bad company.  Nature is a rag-merchant,
who works up every shred and ort and end into new creations; like a
good chemist, whom I found, the other day, in his laboratory,
converting his old shirts into pure white sugar.  Life is a boundless
privilege, and when you pay for your ticket, and get into the car,
you have no guess what good company you shall find there.  You buy
much that is not rendered in the bill.  Men achieve a certain
greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

        If now in this connection of discourse, we should venture on
laying down the first obvious rules of life, I will not here repeat
the first rule of economy, already propounded once and again, that
every man shall maintain himself, -- but I will say, get health.  No
labor, pains, temperance, poverty, nor exercise, that can gain it,
must be grudged.  For sickness is a cannibal which eats up all the
life and youth it can lay hold of, and absorbs its own sons and
daughters.  I figure it as a pale, wailing, distracted phantom,
absolutely selfish, heedless of what is good and great, attentive to
its sensations, losing its soul, and afflicting other souls with
meanness and mopings, and with ministration to its voracity of
trifles.  Dr. Johnson said severely, "Every man is a rascal as soon
as he is sick." Drop the cant, and treat it sanely.  In dealing with
the drunken, we do not affect to be drunk.  We must treat the sick
with the same firmness, giving them, of course, every aid, -- but
withholding ourselves.  I once asked a clergyman in a retired town,
who were his companions? what men of ability he saw? he replied, that
he spent his time with the sick and the dying.  I said, he seemed to
me to need quite other company, and all the more that he had this:
for if people were sick and dying to any purpose, we would leave all
and go to them, but, as far as I had observed, they were as frivolous
as the rest, and sometimes much more frivolous.  Let us engage our
companions not to spare us.  I knew a wise woman who said to her
friends, "When I am old, rule me." And the best part of health is
fine disposition.  It is more essential than talent, even in the
works of talent.  Nothing will supply the want of sunshine to
peaches, and, to make knowledge valuable, you must have the
cheerfulness of wisdom.  Whenever you are sincerely pleased, you are
nourished.  The joy of the spirit indicates its strength.  All
healthy things are sweet-tempered.  Genius works in sport, and
goodness smiles to the last; and, for the reason, that whoever sees
the law which distributes things, does not despond, but is animated
to great desires and endeavors.  He who desponds betrays that he has
not seen it.

        'Tis a Dutch proverb, that "paint costs nothing," such are its
preserving qualities in damp climates.  Well, sunshine costs less,
yet is finer pigment.  And so of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the
more it is spent, the more of it remains.  The latent heat of an
ounce of wood or stone is inexhaustible.  You may rub the same chip
of pine to the point of kindling, a hundred times; and the power of
happiness of any soul is not to be computed or drained.  It is
observed that a depression of spirits develops the germs of a plague
in individuals and nations.

        It is an old commendation of right behavior, "_Aliis laetus, --
sapiens sibi_," which our English proverb translates, "Be merry _and_
wise." I know how easy it is to men of the world to look grave and
sneer at your sanguine youth, and its glittering dreams.  But I find
the gayest castles in the air that were ever piled, far better for
comfort and for use, than the dungeons in the air that are daily dug
and caverned out by grumbling, discontented people.  I know those
miserable fellows, and I hate them, who see a black star always
riding through the light and colored clouds in the sky overhead:
waves of light pass over and hide it for a moment, but the black star
keeps fast in the zenith.  But power dwells with cheerfulness; hope
puts us in a working mood, whilst despair is no muse, and untunes the
active powers.  A man should make life and Nature happier to us, or
he had better never been born.  When the political economist reckons
up the unproductive classes, he should put at the head this class of
pitiers of themselves, cravers of sympathy, bewailing imaginary
disasters.  An old French verse runs, in my translation: --

        Some of your griefs you have cured,
                And the sharpest you still have survived;
        But what torments of pain you endured
                From evils that never arrived!

        There are three wants which never can be satisfied: that of the
rich, who wants something more; that of the sick, who wants something
different; and that of the traveller, who says, `Anywhere but here.'
The Turkish cadi said to Layard, "After the fashion of thy people,
thou hast wandered from one place to another, until thou art happy
and content in none." My countrymen are not less infatuated with the
_rococo_ toy of Italy.  All America seems on the point of embarking
for Europe.  But we shall not always traverse seas and lands with
light purposes, and for pleasure, as we say.  One day we shall cast
out the passion for Europe, by the passion for America.  Culture will
give gravity and domestic rest to those who now travel only as not
knowing how else to spend money.  Already, who provoke pity like that
excellent family party just arriving in their well-appointed
carriage, as far from home and any honest end as ever?  Each nation
has asked successively, `What are they here for?' until at last the
party are shamefaced, and anticipate the question at the gates of
each town.

        Genial manners are good, and power of accommodation to any
circumstance, but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a
man is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in
employment and happiness, -- whether it be to make baskets, or
broadswords, or canals, or statutes, or songs.  I doubt not this was
the meaning of Socrates, when he pronounced artists the only truly
wise, as being actually, not apparently so.

        In childhood, we fancied ourselves walled in by the horizon, as
by a glass bell, and doubted not, by distant travel, we should reach
the baths of the descending sun and stars.  On experiment, the
horizon flies before us, and leaves us on an endless common,
sheltered by no glass bell.  Yet 'tis strange how tenaciously we
cling to that bell-astronomy, of a protecting domestic horizon.  I
find the same illusion in the search after happiness, which I
observe, every summer, recommenced in this neighborhood, soon after
the pairing of the birds.  The young people do not like the town, do
not like the sea-shore, they will go inland; find a dear cottage deep
in the mountains, secret as their hearts.  They set forth on their
travels in search of a home: they reach Berkshire; they reach
Vermont; they look at the farms; -- good farms, high mountain-sides:
but where is the seclusion?  The farm is near this; 'tis near that;
they have got far from Boston, but 'tis near Albany, or near
Burlington, or near Montreal.  They explore a farm, but the house is
small, old, thin; discontented people lived there, and are gone: --
there's too much sky, too much out-doors; too public.  The youth
aches for solitude.  When he comes to the house, he passes through
the house.  That does not make the deep recess he sought.  `Ah! now,
I perceive,' he says, `it must be deep with persons; friends only can
give depth.' Yes, but there is a great dearth, this year, of friends;
hard to find, and hard to have when found: they are just going away:
they too are in the whirl of the flitting world, and have engagements
and necessities.  They are just starting for Wisconsin; have letters
from Bremen: -- see you again, soon.  Slow, slow to learn the lesson,
that there is but one depth, but one interior, and that is -- his
purpose.  When joy or calamity or genius shall show him it, then
woods, then farms, then city shopmen and cab-drivers, indifferently
with prophet or friend, will mirror back to him its unfathomable
heaven, its populous solitude.

        The uses of travel are occasional, and short; but the best
fruit it finds, when it finds it, is conversation; and this is a main
function of life.  What a difference in the hospitality of minds!
Inestimable is he to whom we can say what we cannot say to ourselves.
Others are involuntarily hurtful to us, and bereave us of the power
of thought, impound and imprison us.  As, when there is sympathy,
there needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise, -- so, a
blockhead makes a blockhead of his companion.  Wonderful power to
benumb possesses this brother.  When he comes into the office or
public room, the society dissolves; one after another slips out, and
the apartment is at his disposal.  What is incurable but a frivolous
habit?  A fly is as untamable as a hyena.  Yet folly in the sense of
fun, fooling, or dawdling can easily be borne; as Talleyrand said, "I
find nonsense singularly refreshing;" but a virulent, aggressive fool
taints the reason of a household.  I have seen a whole family of
quiet, sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, victims of
such a rogue.  For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person
irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity.  But
resistance only exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature
and gravitation are quite wrong, and he only is right.  Hence all the
dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues and
industries they have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and
repairers of this one malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or
a carriage run away with, -- not only the foolish pilot or driver,
but everybody on board is forced to assume strange and ridiculous
attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting.  For
remedy, whilst the case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth:
let all the truth that is spoken or done be at the zero of
indifferency, or truth itself will be folly.  But, when the case is
seated and malignant, the only safety is in amputation; as seamen
say, you shall cut and run.  How to live with unfit companions? --
for, with such, life is for the most part spent: and experience
teaches little better than our earliest instinct of self-defence,
namely, not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with them;
but let their madness spend itself unopposed; -- you are you, and I
am I.

        Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his
competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while
they live.  Our habit of thought, -- take men as they rise, -- is not
satisfying; in the common experience, I fear, it is poor and squalid.
The success which will content them, is, a bargain, a lucrative
employment, an advantage gained over a competitor, a marriage, a
patrimony, a legacy, and the like.  With these objects, their
conversation deals with surfaces: politics, trade, personal defects,
exaggerated bad news, and the rain.  This is forlorn, and they feel
sore and sensitive.  Now, if one comes who can illuminate this dark
house with thoughts, show them their native riches, what gifts they
have, how indispensable each is, what magical powers over nature and
men; what access to poetry, religion, and the powers which constitute
character; he wakes in them the feeling of worth, his suggestions
require new ways of living, new books, new men, new arts and
sciences, -- then we come out of our egg-shell existence into the
great dome, and see the zenith over and the nadir under us.  Instead
of the tanks and buckets of knowledge to which we are daily confined,
we come down to the shore of the sea, and dip our hands in its
miraculous waves.  'Tis wonderful the effect on the company.  They
are not the men they were.  They have all been to California, and all
have come back millionnaires.  There is no book and no pleasure in
life comparable to it.  Ask what is best in our experience, and we
shall say, a few pieces of plain-dealing with wise people.  Our
conversation once and again has apprised us that we belong to better
circles than we have yet beheld; that a mental power invites us,
whose generalizations are more worth for joy and for effect than
anything that is now called philosophy or literature.  In excited
conversation, we have glimpses of the Universe, hints of power native
to the soul, far-darting lights and shadows of an Andes landscape,
such as we can hardly attain in lone meditation.  Here are oracles
sometimes profusely given, to which the memory goes back in barren
hours.

        Add the consent of will and temperament, and there exists the
covenant of friendship.  Our chief want in life, is, somebody who
shall make us do what we can.  This is the service of a friend.  With
him we are easily great.  There is a sublime attraction in him to
whatever virtue is in us.  How he flings wide the doors of existence!
What questions we ask of him! what an understanding we have! how few
words are needed!  It is the only real society.  An Eastern poet, Ali
Ben Abu Taleb, writes with sad truth, --

        "He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare,
        And he who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere."

        But few writers have said anything better to this point than
Hafiz, who indicates this relation as the test of mental health:
"Thou learnest no secret until thou knowest friendship, since to the
unsound no heavenly knowledge enters." Neither is life long enough
for friendship.  That is a serious and majestic affair, like a royal
presence, or a religion, and not a postilion's dinner to be eaten on
the run.  There is a pudency about friendship, as about love, and
though fine souls never lose sight of it, yet they do not name it.
With the first class of men our friendship or good understanding goes
quite behind all accidents of estrangement, of condition, of
reputation.  And yet we do not provide for the greatest good of life.
We take care of our health; we lay up money; we make our roof tight,
and our clothing sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall
not be wanting in the best property of all, -- friends?  We know that
all our training is to fit us for this, and we do not take the step
towards it.  How long shall we sit and wait for these benefactors?

        It makes no difference, in looking back five years, how you
have been dieted or dressed; whether you have been lodged on the
first floor or the attic; whether you have had gardens and baths,
good cattle and horses, have been carried in a neat equipage, or in a
ridiculous truck: these things are forgotten so quickly, and leave no
effect.  But it counts much whether we have had good companions, in
that time; -- almost as much as what we have been doing.  And see the
overpowering importance of neighborhood in all association.  As it is
marriage, fit or unfit, that makes our home, so it is who lives near
us of equal social degree, -- a few people at convenient distance, no
matter how bad company, -- these, and these only, shall be your
life's companions: and all those who are native, congenial, and by
many an oath of the heart, sacramented to you, are gradually and
totally lost.  You cannot deal systematically with this fine element
of society, and one may take a good deal of pains to bring people
together, and to organize clubs and debating societies, and yet no
result come of it.  But it is certain that there is a great deal of
good in us that does not know itself, and that a habit of union and
competition brings people up and keeps them up to their highest
point; that life would be twice or ten times life, if spent with wise
and fruitful companions.  The obvious inference is, a little useful
deliberation and preconcert, when one goes to buy house and land.

        But we live with people on other platforms; we live with
dependents, not only with the young whom we are to teach all we know,
and clothe with the advantages we have earned, but also with those
who serve us directly, and for money.  Yet the old rules hold good.
Let not the tie be mercenary, though the service is measured by
money.  Make yourself necessary to somebody.  Do not make life hard
to any.  This point is acquiring new importance in American social
life.  Our domestic service is usually a foolish fracas of
unreasonable demand on one side, and shirking on the other.  A man of
wit was asked, in the train, what was his errand in the city?  He
replied, "I have been sent to procure an angel to do cooking." A lady
complained to me, that, of her two maidens, one was absent-minded,
and the other was absent-bodied.  And the evil increases from the
ignorance and hostility of every ship-load of the immigrant
population swarming into houses and farms.  Few people discern that
it rests with the master or the mistress what service comes from the
man or the maid; that this identical hussy was a tutelar spirit in
one house, and a haridan in the other.  All sensible people are
selfish, and nature is tugging at every contract to make the terms of
it fair.  If you are proposing only your own, the other party must
deal a little hardly by you.  If you deal generously, the other,
though selfish and unjust, will make an exception in your favor, and
deal truly with you.  When I asked an iron-master about the slag and
cinder in railroad iron, -- "O," he said, "there's always good iron
to be had: if there's cinder in the iron, 'tis because there was
cinder in the pay."

        But why multiply these topics, and their illustrations, which
are endless?  Life brings to each his task, and, whatever art you
select, algebra, planting, architecture, poems, commerce, politics,
-- all are attainable, even to the miraculous triumphs, on the same
terms, of selecting that for which you are apt; -- begin at the
beginning, proceed in order, step by step.  'Tis as easy to twist
iron anchors, and braid cannons, as to braid straw, to boil granite
as to boil water, if you take all the steps in order.  Wherever there
is failure, there is some giddiness, some superstition about luck,
some step omitted, which Nature never pardons.  The happy conditions
of life may be had on the same terms.  Their attraction for you is
the pledge that they are within your reach.  Our prayers are
prophets.  There must be fidelity, and there must be adherence.  How
respectable the life that clings to its objects!  Youthful
aspirations are fine things, your theories and plans of life are fair
and commendable: -- but will you stick?  Not one, I fear, in that
Common full of people, or, in a thousand, but one: and, when you tax
them with treachery, and remind them of their high resolutions, they
have forgotten that they made a vow.  The individuals are fugitive,
and in the act of becoming something else, and irresponsible.  The
race is great, the ideal fair, but the men whiffling and unsure.  The
hero is he who is immovably centred.  The main difference between
people seems to be, that one man can come under obligations on which
you can rely, -- is obligable; and another is not.  As he has not a
law within him, there's nothing to tie him to.

        'Tis inevitable to name particulars of virtue, and of
condition, and to exaggerate them.  But all rests at last on that
integrity which dwarfs talent, and can spare it.  Sanity consists in
not being subdued by your means.  Fancy prices are paid for position,
and for the culture of talent, but to the grand interests,
superficial success is of no account.  The man, -- it is his
attitude, -- not feats, but forces, -- not on set days and public
occasions, but, at all hours, and in repose alike as in energy, still
formidable, and not to be disposed of.  The populace says, with Horne
Tooke, "If you would be powerful, pretend to be powerful." I prefer
to say, with the old prophet, "Seekest thou great things? seek them
not:" -- or, what was said of a Spanish prince, "The more you took
from him, the greater he looked." _Plus on lui ote, plus il est
grand_.

        The secret of culture is to learn, that a few great points
steadily reappear, alike in the poverty of the obscurest farm, and in
the miscellany of metropolitan life, and that these few are alone to
be regarded, -- the escape from all false ties; courage to be what we
are; and love of what is simple and beautiful; independence, and
cheerful relation, these are the essentials, -- these, and the wish
to serve, -- to add somewhat to the well-being of men.

        VIII
 
        BEAUTY
 
        Was never form and never face
        So sweet to SEYD as only grace
        Which did not slumber like a stone
        But hovered gleaming and was gone.
        Beauty chased he everywhere,
        In flame, in storm, in clouds of air.
        He smote the lake to feed his eye
        With the beryl beam of the broken wave;
        He flung in pebbles well to hear
        The moment's music which they gave.
        Oft pealed for him a lofty tone
        From nodding pole and belting zone.
        He heard a voice none else could hear
        From centred and from errant sphere.
        The quaking earth did quake in rhyme,
        Seas ebbed and flowed in epic chime.
        In dens of passion, and pits of wo,
        He saw strong Eros struggling through,
        To sun the dark and solve the curse,
        And beam to the bounds of the universe.
        While thus to love he gave his days
        In loyal worship, scorning praise,
        How spread their lures for him, in vain,
        Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain!
        He thought it happier to be dead,
        To die for Beauty, than live for bread.

 
        _Beauty_

        The spiral tendency of vegetation infects education also.  Our
books approach very slowly the things we most wish to know.  What a
parade we make of our science, and how far off, and at arm's length,
it is from its objects!  Our botany is all names, not powers: poets
and romancers talk of herbs of grace and healing; but what does the
botanist know of the virtues of his weeds?  The geologist lays bare
the strata, and can tell them all on his fingers: but does he know
what effect passes into the man who builds his house in them? what
effect on the race that inhabits a granite shelf? what on the
inhabitants of marl and of alluvium?

        We should go to the ornithologist with a new feeling, if he
could teach us what the social birds say, when they sit in the autumn
council, talking together in the trees.  The want of sympathy makes
his record a dull dictionary.  His result is a dead bird.  The bird
is not in its ounces and inches, but in its relations to Nature; and
the skin or skeleton you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of
ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has been reduced, is
Dante or Washington.  The naturalist is led _from_ the road by the
whole distance of his fancied advance.  The boy had juster views when
he gazed at the shells on the beach, or the flowers in the meadow,
unable to call them by their names, than the man in the pride of his
nomenclature.  Astrology interested us, for it tied man to the
system.  Instead of an isolated beggar, the farthest star felt him,
and he felt the star.  However rash and however falsified by
pretenders and traders in it,onsmustfurnish the hint was true and
divine, the soul's avowal of its large relations, and, that climate,
century, remote natures, as well as near, are part of its biography.
Chemistry takes to pieces, but it does not construct.  Alchemy which
sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm
with power, -- that was in the right direction.  All our science
lacks a human side.  The tenant is more than the house.  Bugs and
stamens and spores, on which we lavish so many years, are not
finalities, and man, when his powers unfold in order, will take
Nature along with him, and emit light into all her recesses.  The
human heart concerns us more than the poring into microscopes, and is
larger than can be measured by the pompous figures of the astronomer.

        We are just so frivolous and skeptical.  Men hold themselves
cheap and vile: and yet a man is a fagot of thunderbolts.  All the
elements pour through his system: he is the flood of the flood, and
fire of the fire; he feels the antipodes and the pole, as drops of
his blood: they are the extension of his personality.  His duties are
measured by that instrument he is; and a right and perfect man would
be felt to the centre of the Copernican system.  'Tis curious that we
only believe as deep as we live.  We do not think heroes can exert
any more awful power than that surface-play which amuses us.  A deep
man believes in miracles, waits for them, believes in magic, believes
that the orator will decompose his adversary; believes that the evil
eye can wither, that the heart's blessing can heal; that love can
exalt talent; can overcome all odds.  From a great heart secret
magnetisms flow incessantly to draw great events.  But we prize very
humble utilities, a prudent husband, a good son, a voter, a citizen,
and deprecate any romance of character; and perhaps reckon only his
money value, -- his intellect, his affection, as a sort of bill of
exchange, easily convertible into fine chambers, pictures,
musonsmustfurnishic, and wine.

        The motive of science was the extension of man, on all sides,
into Nature, till his hands should touch the stars, his eyes see
through the earth, his ears understand the language of beast and
bird, and the sense of the wind; and, through his sympathy, heaven
and earth should talk with him.  But that is not our science.  These
geologies, chemistries, astronomies, seem to make wise, but they
leave us where they found us.  The invention is of use to the
inventor, of questionable help to any other.  The formulas of science
are like the papers in your pocket-book, of no value to any but the
owner.  Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates
the name of love and moral purpose.  There's a revenge for this
inhumanity.  What manner of man does science make?  The boy is not
attracted.  He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my
professor is.  The collector has dried all the plants in his herbal,
but he has lost weight and humor.  He has got all snakes and lizards
in his phials, but science has done for him also, and has put the man
into a bottle.  Our reliance on the physician is a kind of despair of
ourselves.  The clergy have bronchitis, which does not seem a
certificate of spiritual health.  Macready thought it came of the
_falsetto_ of their voicing.  An Indian prince, Tisso, one day riding
in the forest, saw a herd of elk sporting.  "See how happy," he said,
"these browsing elks are!  Why should not priests, lodged and fed
comfortably in the temples, also amuse themselves?" Returning home,
he imparted this reflection to the king.  The king, on the next day,
conferred the sovereignty on him, saying, "Prince, administer this
empire for seven days: at the termination of that period, I shall put
thee to death." At the end of the seventh day, the king inquired,
"From what cause hast thou become so emaciated?" He answered, "From
the horror of death." The monarch rejoined: "Live, my child, and be
wise.  Thou hast ceased to taonsmustfurnishke recreation, saying to
thyself, in seven days I shall be put to death.  These priests in the
temple incessantly meditate on death; how can they enter into
healthful diversions?" But the men of science or the doctors or the
clergy are not victims of their pursuits, more than others.  The
miller, the lawyer, and the merchant, dedicate themselves to their
own details, and do not come out men of more force.  Have they
divination, grand aims, hospitality of soul, and the equality to any
event, which we demand in man, or only the reactions of the mill, of
the wares, of the chicane?

        No object really interests us but man, and in man only his
superiorities; and, though we are aware of a perfect law in Nature,
it has fascination for us only through its relation to him, or, as it
is rooted in the mind.  At the birth of Winckelmann, more than a
hundred years ago, side by side with this arid, departmental, _post
mortem_ science, rose an enthusiasm in the study of Beauty; and
perhaps some sparks from it may yet light a conflagration in the
other.  Knowledge of men, knowledge of manners, the power of form,
and our sensibility to personal influence, never go out of fashion.
These are facts of a science which we study without book, whose
teachers and subjects are always near us.

        So inveterate is our habit of criticism, that much of our
knowledge in this direction belongs to the chapter of pathology.  The
crowd in the street oftener furnishes degradations than angels or
redeemers: but they all prove the transparency.  Every spirit makes
its house; and we can give a shrewd guess from the house to the
inhabitant.  But not less does Nature furnish us with every sign of
grace and goodness.  The delicious faces of children, the beauty of
school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of
well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and
manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that
well-known company that escort uonsmustfurnishs through life, -- we
know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge
us.

        Beauty is the form under which the intellect prefers to study
the world.  All privilege is that of beauty; for there are many
beauties; as, of general nature, of the human face and form, of
manners, of brain, or method, moral beauty, or beauty of the soul.

        The ancients believed that a genius or demon took possession at
birth of each mortal, to guide him; that these genii were sometimes
seen as a flame of fire partly immersed in the bodies which they
governed; -- on an evil man, resting on his head; in a good man,
mixed with his substance.  They thought the same genius, at the death
of its ward, entered a new-born child, and they pretended to guess
the pilot, by the sailing of the ship.  We recognize obscurely the
same fact, though we give it our own names.  We say, that every man
is entitled to be valued by his best moment.  We measure our friends
so.  We know, they have intervals of folly, whereof we take no heed,
but wait the reappearings of the genius, which are sure and
beautiful.  On the other side, everybody knows people who appear
beridden, and who, with all degrees of ability, never impress us with
the air of free agency.  They know it too, and peep with their eyes
to see if you detect their sad plight.  We fancy, could we pronounce
the solving word, and disenchant them, the cloud would roll up, the
little rider would be discovered and unseated, and they would regain
their freedom.  The remedy seems never to be far off, since the first
step into thought lifts this mountain of necessity.  Thought is the
pent air-ball which can rive the planet, and the beauty which certain
objects have for him, is the friendly fire which expands the thought,
and acquaints the prisoner that liberty and power await him.

        The question of Beauty takes us out of surfaces, to thinking of
the foundations of things.  Goethe said, "The beautiful is a
manifestation ofonsmustfurnish secret laws of Nature, which, but for
this appearance, had been forever concealed from us." And the working
of this deep instinct makes all the excitement -- much of it
superficial and absurd enough -- about works of art, which leads
armies of vain travellers every year to Italy, Greece, and Egypt.
Every man values every acquisition he makes in the science of beauty,
above his possessions.  The most useful man in the most useful world,
so long as only commodity was served, would remain unsatisfied.  But,
as fast as he sees beauty, life acquires a very high value.

        I am warned by the ill fate of many philosophers not to attempt
a definition of Beauty.  I will rather enumerate a few of its
qualities.  We ascribe beauty to that which is simple; which has no
superfluous parts; which exactly answers its end; which stands
related to all things; which is the mean of many extremes.  It is the
most enduring quality, and the most ascending quality.  We say, love
is blind, and the figure of Cupid is drawn with a bandage round his
eyes.  Blind: -- yes, because he does not see what he does not like;
but the sharpest-sighted hunter in the universe is Love, for finding
what he seeks, and only that; and the mythologists tell us, that
Vulcan was painted lame, and Cupid blind, to call attention to the
fact, that one was all limbs, and the other, all eyes.  In the true
mythology, Love is an immortal child, and Beauty leads him as a
guide: nor can we express a deeper sense than when we say, Beauty is
the pilot of the young soul.

        Beyond their sensuous delight, the forms and colors of Nature
have a new charm for us in our perception, that not one ornament was
added for ornament, but is a sign of some better health, or more
excellent action.  Elegance of form in bird or beast, or in the human
figure, marks some excellence of structure: or beauty is only an
invitation from what belongs to us.  'Tis a law of botany, that in
plants, the same virtues follow the same forms.  It is
onsmustfurnisha rule of largest application, true in a plant, true in
a loaf of bread, that in the construction of any fabric or organism,
any real increase of fitness to its end, is an increase of beauty.

        The lesson taught by the study of Greek and of Gothic art, of
antique and of Pre-Raphaelite painting, was worth all the research,
-- namely, that all beauty must be organic; that outside
embellishment is deformity.  It is the soundness of the bones that
ultimates itself in a peach-bloom complexion: health of constitution
that makes the sparkle and the power of the eye.  'Tis the adjustment
of the size and of the joining of the sockets of the skeleton, that
gives grace of outline and the finer grace of movement.  The cat and
the deer cannot move or sit inelegantly.  The dancing-master can
never teach a badly built man to walk well.  The tint of the flower
proceeds from its root, and the lustres of the sea-shell begin with
its existence.  Hence our taste in building rejects paint, and all
shifts, and shows the original grain of the wood: refuses pilasters
and columns that support nothing, and allows the real supporters of
the house honestly to show themselves.  Every necessary or organic
action pleases the beholder.  A man leading a horse to water, a
farmer sowing seed, the labors of haymakers in the field, the
carpenter building a ship, the smith at his forge, or, whatever
useful labor, is becoming to the wise eye.  But if it is done to be
seen, it is mean.  How beautiful are ships on the sea! but ships in
the theatre, -- or ships kept for picturesque effect on Virginia
Water, by George IV., and men hired to stand in fitting costumes at a
penny an hour!  -- What a difference in effect between a battalion of
troops marching to action, and one of our independent companies on a
holiday!  In the midst of a military show, and a festal procession
gay with banners, I saw a boy seize an old tin pan that lay rusting
under a wall, and poising it on the top of a stick, he set
onsmustfurnishit turning, and made it describe the most elegant
imaginable curves, and drew away attention from the decorated
procession by this startling beauty.

        Another text from the mythologists.  The Greeks fabled that
Venus was born of the foam of the sea.  Nothing interests us which is
stark or bounded, but only what streams with life, what is in act or
endeavor to reach somewhat beyond.  The pleasure a palace or a temple
gives the eye, is, that an order and method has been communicated to
stones, so that they speak and geometrize, become tender or sublime
with expression.  Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form
were just ready to flow into other forms.  Any fixedness, heaping, or
concentration on one feature, -- a long nose, a sharp chin, a
hump-back, -- is the reverse of the flowing, and therefore deformed.
Beautiful as is the symmetry of any form, if the form can move, we
seek a more excellent symmetry.  The interruption of equilibrium
stimulates the eye to desire the restoration of symmetry, and to
watch the steps through which it is attained.  This is the charm of
running water, sea-waves, the flight of birds, and the locomotion of
animals.  This is the theory of dancing, to recover continually in
changes the lost equilibrium, not by abrupt and angular, but by
gradual and curving movements.  I have been told by persons of
experience in matters of taste, that the fashions follow a law of
gradation, and are never arbitrary.  The new mode is always only a
step onward in the same direction as the last mode; and a cultivated
eye is prepared for and predicts the new fashion.  This fact suggests
the reason of all mistakes and offence in our own modes.  It is
necessary in music, when you strike a discord, to let down the ear by
an intermediate note or two to the accord again: and many a good
experiment, born of good sense, and destined to succeed, fails, only
because it is offensively sudden.  I suppose, the Parisian milliner
who dresses the world from her onsmustfurnishimperious boudoir will
know how to reconcile the Bloomer costume to the eye of mankind, and
make it triumphant over Punch himself, by interposing the just
gradations.  I need not say, how wide the same law ranges; and how
much it can be hoped to effect.  All that is a little harshly claimed
by progressive parties, may easily come to be conceded without
question, if this rule be observed.  Thus the circumstances may be
easily imagined, in which woman may speak, vote, argue causes,
legislate, and drive a coach, and all the most naturally in the
world, if only it come by degrees.  To this streaming or flowing
belongs the beauty that all circular movement has; as, the
circulation of waters, the circulation of the blood, the periodical
motion of planets, the annual wave of vegetation, the action and
reaction of Nature: and, if we follow it out, this demand in our
thought for an ever-onward action, is the argument for the
immortality.

 
        One more text from the mythologists is to the same purpose, --
_Beauty rides on a lion_.  Beauty rests on necessities.  The line of
beauty is the result of perfect economy.  The cell of the bee is
built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax;
the bone or the quill of the bird gives the most alar strength, with
the least weight.  "It is the purgation of superfluities," said
Michel Angelo.  There is not a particle to spare in natural
structures.  There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant,
for every novelty of color or form: and our art saves material, by
more skilful arrangement, and reaches beauty by taking every
superfluous ounce that can be spared from a wall, and keeping all its
strength in the poetry of columns.  In rhetoric, this art of omission
is a chief secret of power, and, in general, it is proof of high
culture, to say the greatest matters in the simplest way.

        Veracity first of all, and forever.  _Rien de beau que le
vrai_.  In all design, art lies in making your object
pronsmustfurnishominent, but there is a prior art in choosing objects
that are prominent.  The fine arts have nothing casual, but spring
from the instincts of the nations that created them.

        Beauty is the quality which makes to endure.  In a house that I
know, I have noticed a block of spermaceti lying about closets and
mantel-pieces, for twenty years together, simply because the
tallow-man gave it the form of a rabbit; and, I suppose, it may
continue to be lugged about unchanged for a century.  Let an artist
scrawl a few lines or figures on the back of a letter, and that scrap
of paper is rescued from danger, is put in portfolio, is framed and
glazed, and, in proportion to the beauty of the lines drawn, will be
kept for centuries.  Burns writes a copy of verses, and sends them to
a newspaper, and the human race take charge of them that they shall
not perish.

        As the flute is heard farther than the cart, see how surely a
beautiful form strikes the fancy of men, and is copied and reproduced
without end.  How many copies are there of the Belvedere Apollo, the
Venus, the Psyche, the Warwick Vase, the Parthenon, and the Temple of
Vesta?  These are objects of tenderness to all.  In our cities, an
ugly building is soon removed, and is never repeated, but any
beautiful building is copied and improved upon, so that all masons
and carpenters work to repeat and preserve the agreeable forms,
whilst the ugly ones die out.

        The felicities of design in art, or in works of Nature, are
shadows or forerunners of that beauty which reaches its perfection in
the human form.  All men are its lovers.  Wherever it goes, it
creates joy and hilarity, and everything is permitted to it.  It
reaches its height in woman.  "To Eve," say the Mahometans, "God gave
two thirds of all beauty." A beautiful woman is a practical poet,
taming her savage mate, planting tenderness, hope, and eloquence, in
all whom she approaches.  Some favors of condition must go with it,
since a certain serenity is essential, onsmustfurnishbut we love its
reproofs and superiorities.  Nature wishes that woman should attract
man, yet she often cunningly moulds into her face a little sarcasm,
which seems to say, `Yes, I am willing to attract, but to attract a
little better kind of a man than any I yet behold.' French _memoires_
of the fifteenth century celebrate the name of Pauline de Viguiere, a
virtuous and accomplished maiden, who so fired the enthusiasm of her
contemporaries, by her enchanting form, that the citizens of her
native city of Toulouse obtained the aid of the civil authorities to
compel her to appear publicly on the balcony at least twice a week,
and, as often as she showed herself, the crowd was dangerous to life.
Not less, in England, in the last century, was the fame of the
Gunnings, of whom, Elizabeth married the Duke of Hamilton; and Maria,
the Earl of Coventry.  Walpole says, "the concourse was so great,
when the Duchess of Hamilton was presented at court, on Friday, that
even the noble crowd in the drawing-room clambered on chairs and
tables to look at her.  There are mobs at their doors to see them get
into their chairs, and people go early to get places at the theatres,
when it is known they will be there." "Such crowds," he adds,
elsewhere, "flock to see the Duchess of Hamilton, that seven hundred
people sat up all night, in and about an inn, in Yorkshire, to see
her get into her post-chaise next morning."

        But why need we console ourselves with the fames of Helen of
Argos, or Corinna, or Pauline of Toulouse, or the Duchess of
Hamilton?  We all know this magic very well, or can divine it.  It
does not hurt weak eyes to look into beautiful eyes never so long.
Women stand related to beautiful Nature around us, and the enamored
youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters,
and the pomp of summer.  They heal us of awkwardness by their words
and looks.  We observe their intellectual influence on the most
serious student.  They refine and consmustfurnishlear his mind; teach
him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult.  We talk
to them, and wish to be listened to; we fear to fatigue them, and
acquire a facility of expression which passes from conversation into
habit of style.

        That Beauty is the normal state, is shown by the perpetual
effort of Nature to attain it.  Mirabeau had an ugly face on a
handsome ground; and we see faces every day which have a good type,
but have been marred in the casting: a proof that we are all entitled
to beauty, should have been beautiful, if our ancestors had kept the
laws, -- as every lily and every rose is well.  But our bodies do not
fit us, but caricature and satirize us.  Thus, short legs, which
constrain us to short, mincing steps, are a kind of personal insult
and contumely to the owner; and long stilts, again, put him at
perpetual disadvantage, and force him to stoop to the general level
of mankind.  Martial ridicules a gentleman of his day whose
countenance resembled the face of a swimmer seen under water.  Saadi
describes a schoolmaster "so ugly and crabbed, that a sight of him
would derange the ecstasies of the orthodox." Faces are rarely true
to any ideal type, but are a record in sculpture of a thousand
anecdotes of whim and folly.  Portrait painters say that most faces
and forms are irregular and unsymmetrical; have one eye blue, and one
gray; the nose not straight; and one shoulder higher than another;
the hair unequally distributed, etc.  The man is physically as well
as metaphysically a thing of shreds and patches, borrowed unequally
from good and bad ancestors, and a misfit from the start.

        A beautiful person, among the Greeks, was thought to betray by
this sign some secret favor of the immortal gods: and we can pardon
pride, when a woman possesses such a figure, that wherever she
stands, or moves, or leaves a shadow on the wall, or sits for a
portrait to the artist, she confers a favor on the world.  And yet --
it is not beauty that inspires the deepesonsmustfurnisht passion.
Beauty without grace is the hook without the bait.  Beauty, without
expression, tires.  Abbe Menage said of the President Le Bailleul,
"that he was fit for nothing but to sit for his portrait."  A Greek
epigram intimates that the force of love is not shown by the courting
of beauty, but when the like desire is inflamed for one who is
ill-favored.  And petulant old gentlemen, who have chanced to suffer
some intolerable weariness from pretty people, or who have seen cut
flowers to some profusion, or who see, after a world of pains have
been successfully taken for the costume, how the least mistake in
sentiment takes all the beauty out of your clothes, -- affirm, that
the secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being
uninteresting.

        We love any forms, however ugly, from which great qualities
shine.  If command, eloquence, art, or invention, exist in the most
deformed person, all the accidents that usually displease, please,
and raise esteem and wonder higher.  The great orator was an
emaciated, insignificant person, but he was all brain.  Cardinal De
Retz says of De Bouillon, "With the physiognomy of an ox, he had the
perspicacity of an eagle." It was said of Hooke, the friend of
Newton, "he is the most, and promises the least, of any man in
England." "Since I am so ugly," said Du Guesclin, "it behooves that I
be bold." Sir Philip Sidney, the darling of mankind, Ben Jonson tells
us, "was no pleasant man in countenance, his face being spoiled with
pimples, and of high blood, and long." Those who have ruled human
destinies, like planets, for thousands of years, were not handsome
men.  If a man can raise a small city to be a great kingdom, can make
bread cheap, can irrigate deserts, can join oceans by canals, can
subdue steam, can organize victory, can lead the opinions of mankind,
can enlarge knowledge, 'tis no matter whether his nose is parallel to
his spine, as it ought to be, or whether he has a nose at all;
whether honsmustfurnishis legs are straight, or whether his legs are
amputated; his deformities will come to be reckoned ornamental, and
advantageous on the whole.  This is the triumph of expression,
degrading beauty, charming us with a power so fine and friendly and
intoxicating, that it makes admired persons insipid, and the thought
of passing our lives with them insupportable.  There are faces so
fluid with expression, so flushed and rippled by the play of thought,
that we can hardly find what the mere features really are.  When the
delicious beauty of lineaments loses its power, it is because a more
delicious beauty has appeared; that an interior and durable form has
been disclosed.  Still, Beauty rides on her lion, as before.  Still,
"it was for beauty that the world was made." The lives of the Italian
artists, who established a despotism of genius amidst the dukes and
kings and mobs of their stormy epoch, prove how loyal men in all
times are to a finer brain, a finer method, than their own.  If a man
can cut such a head on his stone gate-post as shall draw and keep a
crowd about it all day, by its beauty, good nature, and inscrutable
meaning; -- if a man can build a plain cottage with such symmetry, as
to make all the fine palaces look cheap and vulgar; can take such
advantage of Nature, that all her powers serve him; making use of
geometry, instead of expense; tapping a mountain for his water-jet;
causing the sun and moon to seem only the decorations of his estate;
this is still the legitimate dominion of beauty.

        The radiance of the human form, though sometimes astonishing,
is only a burst of beauty for a few years or a few months, at the
perfection of youth, and in most, rapidly declines.  But we remain
lovers of it, only transferring our interest to interior excellence.
And it is not only admirable in singular and salient talents, but
also in the world of manners.

        But the sovereign attribute remains to be noted.  Things are
pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsoonsmustfurnishme, but, until
they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful.  This is the reason
why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis.  It is not yet
possessed, it cannot be handled.  Proclus says, "it swims on the
light of forms." It is properly not in the form, but in the mind.  It
instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon.
If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful?
The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all
the near water.  For the imagination and senses cannot be gratified
at the same time.  Wordsworth rightly speaks of "a light that never
was on sea or land," meaning, that it was supplied by the observer,
and the Welsh bard warns his countrywomen, that

        -- "half of their charms with Cadwallon shall die."

        The new virtue which constitutes a thing beautiful, is a
certain cosmical quality, or, a power to suggest relation to the
whole world, and so lift the object out of a pitiful individuality.
Every natural feature, -- sea, sky, rainbow, flowers, musical tone,
-- has in it somewhat which is not private, but universal, speaks of
that central benefit which is the soul of Nature, and thereby is
beautiful.  And, in chosen men and women, I find somewhat in form,
speech, and manners, which is not of their person and family, but of
a humane, catholic, and spiritual character, and we love them as the
sky.  They have a largeness of suggestion, and their face and manners
carry a certain grandeur, like time and justice.

        The feat of the imagination is in showing the convertibility of
every thing into every other thing.  Facts which had never before
left their stark common sense, suddenly figure as Eleusinian
mysteries.  My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in
disguise, meteors and constellations.  All the facts in Nature are
nouns of the intellect, and make the grammar of the eternal language.
Every word has a double, treble, or centupleonsmustfurnish use and
meaning.  What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom!  I cry
you mercy, good shoe-box!  I did not know you were a jewel-case.
Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with
immortality.  And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or
symbolic character of a fact, which no bare fact or event can ever
give.  There are no days in life so memorable as those which vibrated
to some stroke of the imagination.

        The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the
spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of
morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and
whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and
night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong.  Into every beautiful object,
there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much into
form bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into
tones of music, or depths of space.  Polarized light showed the
secret architecture of bodies; and when the _second-sight_ of the
mind is opened, now one color or form or gesture, and now another,
has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted,
disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

        The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature
or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the
fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of
manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if
the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction,
and deigns to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns.  This
is that haughty force of beauty, "_vis superba formae_," which the
poets praise, -- under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and
divine: Beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

        All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the
antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus: and the beauty ever
in proportion tonsmustfurnisho the depth of thought.  Gross and
obscure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but
character gives splendor to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray
hairs.  An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman
who has shared with us the moral sentiment, -- her locks must appear
to us sublime.  Thus there is a climbing scale of culture, from the
first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain
affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the
landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of
thought and character in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of
the intellect.  Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent
from the joy of a horse in his trappings, up to the perception of
Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple
falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe
and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving
Unity, -- the first stair on the scale to the temple of the Mind.

 
 
        IX
 
        ILLUSIONS
 
 
        Flow, flow the waves hated,
        Accursed, adored,
        The waves of mutation:
        No anchorage is.
        Sleep is not, death is not;
        Who seem to die live.
        House you were born in,
        Friends of your spring-time,
        Old man and young maid,
        Day's toil and its guerdon,
        They are all vanishing,
        Fleeing to fables,
        Cannot be moored.
        See the stars through them,
        Through treacherous marbles.
        Know, the stars yonder,
        The stars everlasting,
        Are fugitive also,
        And emulate, vaulted,
        The lambent heat-lightning,
        And fire-fly's flight.
 
        When thou dost return
        On the wave's circulation,
        Beholding the shimmer,
        The wild dissipation,

 
        And, out of endeavor
        To change and to flow,
        The gas become solid,
        And phantoms and nothings
        Return to be things,
        And endless imbroglio
        Is law and the world, --
        Then first shalt thou know,
        That in the wild turmoil,
        Horsed on the Proteus,
        Thou ridest to power,
        And to endurance.
 
 
        _Illusions_
 
        Some years ago, in company with an agreeable parter day in
exploring the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky.  We traversed, through
spacious galleries affording a solid masonry foundation for the town
and county overhead, the six or eight black miles from the mouth of
the cavern to the innermost recess which tourists visit, -- a niche
or grotto made of one seamless stalactite, and called, I believe,
Serena's Bower.  I lost the light of one day.  I saw high domes, and
bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three
quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled
with the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and "Styx;" plied
with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every
form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted
chambers, -- icicle, orange-flower, acanthus, grapes, and snowball.
We shot Bengal lights into the vaults and groins of the sparry
cathedrals, and examined all the masterpieces which the four combined
engineers, water, limestone, gravitation, and time, could make in the
dark.

        The mysteries and scenery of the cave had the same dignity that
belongs to all natural objects, and which shames the fine things to
which we foppishly compare them.  I remarked, especially, the mimetic
habit, with which Nature, on new instruments, hums her old tunes,
making night to mimic day, and chemistry to ape vegetation.  But I
then took notice, and still chiefly remember, that the best thing
which the cave had to offer was an illusion.  On arriving at what is
called the "Star-Chamber," our lamps were taken from us by the guide,
and extinguished or put aside, and, on looking upwards, I saw or
seemed to see the night heaven thick with stars glimmering more or
less brightly over our heads, and even what seemed a comet flaming
among them.  All the party were touched with astonishment and
pleasure.  Our musical friends sung with much feeling a pretty song,
"The stars are in the quiet sky," &c., and I sat down on the rocky
floor to enjoy the serene picture.  Some crystal specks in the black
ceiling high overhead, reflecting the light of a half-hid lamp,
yielded this magnificent effect.

        I own, I did not like the cave so well for eking out its
sublimities with this theatrical trick.  But I have had many
experiences like it, before and since; and we must be content to be
pleased without too curiously analyzing the occasions.  Our
conversation with Nature is not just what it seems.  The cloud-rack,
the sunrise and sunset glories, rainbows, and northern lights are not
quite so spheral as our childhood thought them; and the part our
organization plays in them is too large.  The senses interfere
everywhere, and mix their own structure with all they report of.
Once, we fancied the earth a plane, and stationary.  In admiring the
sunset, we do not yet deduct the rounding, coordinating, pictorial
powers of the eye.

        The same interference from our organization creates the most of
our pleasure and pain.  Our first mistake is the belief that the
circumstance gives the joy which we give to the circumstance.  Life
is an ecstasy.  Life is sweet as nitrous oxide; and the fisherman
dripping all day over a cold pond, the switchman at the railway
intersection, the farmer in the field, the negro in the rice-swamp,
the fop in the street, the hunter in the woods, the barrister with
the jury, the belle at the ball, all ascribe a certain pleasure to
their employment, which they themselves give it.  Health and appetite
impart the sweetness to sugar, bread, and meat.  We fancy that our
civilization has got on far, but we still come back to our primers.

        We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our
sentiments.  The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does
not like to have disturbed.  The boy, how sweet to him is his fancy!
how dear the story of barons and battles!  What a hero he is, whilst
he feeds on his heroes!  What a debt is his to imaginative books!  He
has no better friend or influence, than Scott, Shakspeare, Plutarch,
and Homer.  The man lives to other objects, but who dare affirm that
they are more real?  Even the prose of the streets is full of
refractions.  In the life of the dreariest alderman, fancy enters
into all details, and colors them with rosy hue.  He imitates the air
and actions of people whom he admires, and is raised in his own eyes.
He pays a debt quicker to a rich man than to a poor man.  He wishes
the bow and compliment of some leader in the state, or in society;
weighs what he says; perhaps he never comes nearer to him for that,
but dies at last better contented for this amusement of his eyes and
his fancy.

        The world rolls, the din of life is never hushed.  In London,
in Paris, in Boston, in San Francisco, the carnival, the masquerade
is at its height.  Nobody drops his domino.  The unities, the
fictions of the piece it would be an impertinence to break.  The
chapter of fascinations is very long.  Great is paint; nay, God is
the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many
illusions.  Society does not love its un-maskers.  It was wittily, if
somewhat bitterly, said by D'Alembert, _"qu'un etat de vapeur etait
un etat tres facheux, parcequ'il nous faisait voir les choses comme
elles sont."_ I find men victims of illusion in all parts of life.
Children, youths, adults, and old men, all are led by one bawble or
another.  Yoganidra, the goddess of illusion, Proteus, or Momus, or
Gylfi's Mocking, -- for the Power has many names, -- is stronger than
the Titans, stronger than Apollo.  Few have overheard the gods, or
surprised their secret.  Life is a succession of lessons which must
be lived to be understood.  All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is
another riddle.  There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a
snow-storm.  We wake from one dream into another dream.  The toys, to
be sure, are various, and are graduated in refinement to the quality
of the dupe.  The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are
easily amused.  But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the
pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.

        Amid the joyous troop who give in to the charivari, comes now
and then a sad-eyed boy, whose eyes lack the requisite refractions to
clothe the show in due glory, and who is afflicted with a tendency to
trace home the glittering miscellany of fruits and flowers to one
root.  Science is a search after identity, and the scientific whim is
lurking in all corners.  At the State Fair, a friend of mine
complained that all the varieties of fancy pears in our orchards seem
to have been selected by somebody who had a whim for a particular
kind of pear, and only cultivated such as had that perfume; they were
all alike.  And I remember the quarrel of another youth with the
confectioners, that, when he racked his wit to choose the best
comfits in the shops, in all the endless varieties of sweetmeat he
could only find three flavors, or two.  What then?  Pears and cakes
are good for something; and because you, unluckily, have an eye or
nose too keen, why need you spoil the comfort which the rest of us
find in them?  I knew a humorist, who, in a good deal of rattle, had
a grain or two of sense.  He shocked the company by maintaining that
the attributes of God were two, -- power and risibility; and that it
was the duty of every pious man to keep up the comedy.  And I have
known gentlemen of great stake in the community, but whose sympathies
were cold, -- presidents of colleges, and governors, and senators, --
who held themselves bound to sign every temperance pledge, and act
with Bible societies, and missions, and peace-makers, and cry
_Hist-a-boy!_ to every good dog.  We must not carry comity too far,
but we all have kind impulses in this direction.  When the boys come
into my yard for leave to gather horse-chestnuts, I own I enter into
Nature's game, and affect to grant the permission reluctantly,
fearing that any moment they will find out the imposture of that
showy chaff.  But this tenderness is quite unnecessary; the
enchantments are laid on very thick.  Their young life is thatched
with them.  Bare and grim to tears is the lot of the children in the
hovel I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung it round with
frippery romance, like the children of the happiest fortune, and
talked of "the dear cottage where so many joyful hours had flown."
Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country.  Women,
more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion.  Being
fascinated, they fascinate.  They see through Claude-Lorraines.  And
how dare any one, if he could, pluck away the _coulisses_, stage
effects, and ceremonies, by which they live?  Too pathetic, too
pitiable, is the region of affection, and its atmosphere always
liable to _mirage_.

        We are not very much to blame for our bad marriages.  We live
amid hallucinations; and this especial trap is laid to trip up our
feet with, and all are tripped up first or last.  But the mighty
Mother who had been so sly with us, as if she felt that she owed us
some indemnity, insinuates into the Pandora-box of marriage some deep
and serious benefits, and some great joys.  We find a delight in the
beauty and happiness of children, that makes the heart too big for
the body.  In the worst-assorted connections there is ever some
mixture of true marriage.  Teague and his jade get some just
relations of mutual respect, kindly observation, and fostering of
each other, learn something, and would carry themselves wiselier, if
they were now to begin.

        'Tis fine for us to point at one or another fine madman, as if
there were any exempts.  The scholar in his library is none.  I, who
have all my life heard any number of orations and debates, read poems
and miscellaneous books, conversed with many geniuses, am still the
victim of any new page; and, if Marmaduke, or Hugh, or Moosehead, or
any other, invent a new style or mythology, I fancy that the world
will be all brave and right, if dressed in these colors, which I had
not thought of.  Then at once I will daub with this new paint; but it
will not stick.  'Tis like the cement which the peddler sells at the
door; he makes broken crockery hold with it, but you can never buy of
him a bit of the cement which will make it hold when he is gone.

        Men who make themselves felt in the world avail themselves of a
certain fate in their constitution, which they know how to use.  But
they never deeply interest us, unless they lift a corner of the
curtain, or betray never so slightly their penetration of what is
behind it.  'Tis the charm of practical men, that outside of their
practicality are a certain poetry and play, as if they led the good
horse Power by the bridle, and preferred to walk, though they can
ride so fiercely.  Bonaparte is intellectual, as well as Caesar; and
the best soldiers, sea-captains, and railway men have a gentleness,
when off duty; a good-natured admission that there are illusions, and
who shall say that he is not their sport?  We stigmatize the
cast-iron fellows, who cannot so detach themselves, as
"dragon-ridden," "thunder-stricken," and fools of fate, with whatever
powers endowed.

        Since our tuition is through emblems and indirections, 'tis
well to know that there is method in it, a fixed scale, and rank
above rank in the phantasms.  We begin low with coarse masks, and
rise to the most subtle and beautiful.  The red men told Columbus,
"they had an herb which took away fatigue;" but he found the illusion
of "arriving from the east at the Indies" more composing to his lofty
spirit than any tobacco.  Is not our faith in the impenetrability of
matter more sedative than narcotics?  You play with jackstraws,
balls, bowls, horse and gun, estates and politics; but there are
finer games before you.  Is not time a pretty toy?  Life will show
you masks that are worth all your carnivals.  Yonder mountain must
migrate into your mind.  The fine star-dust and nebulous blur in
Orion, "the portentous year of Mizar and Alcor," must come down and
be dealt with in your household thought.  What if you shall come to
discern that the play and playground of all this pompous history are
radiations from yourself, and that the sun borrows his beams?  What
terrible questions we are learning to ask!  The former men believed
in magic, by which temples, cities, and men were swallowed up, and
all trace of them gone.  We are coming on the secret of a magic which
sweeps out of men's minds all vestige of theism and beliefs which
they and their fathers held and were framed upon.

        There are deceptions of the senses, deceptions of the passions,
and the structural, beneficent illusions of sentiment and of the
intellect.  There is the illusion of love, which attributes to the
beloved person all which that person shares with his or her family,
sex, age, or condition, nay, with the human mind itself.  'Tis these
which the lover loves, and Anna Matilda gets the credit of them.  As
if one shut up always in a tower, with one window, through which the
face of heaven and earth could be seen, should fancy that all the
marvels he beheld belonged to that window.  There is the illusion of
time, which is very deep; who has disposed of it? or come to the
conviction that what seems the _succession_ of thought is only the
distribution of wholes into causal series?  The intellect sees that
every atom carries the whole of Nature; that the mind opens to
omnipotence; that, in the endless striving and ascents, the
metamorphosis is entire, so that the soul doth not know itself in its
own act, when that act is perfected.  There is illusion that shall
deceive even the elect.  There is illusion that shall deceive even
the performer of the miracle.  Though he make his body, he denies
that he makes it.  Though the world exist from thought, thought is
daunted in presence of the world.  One after the other we accept the
mental laws, still resisting those which follow, which however must
be accepted.  But all our concessions only compel us to new
profusion.  And what avails it that science has come to treat space
and time as simply forms of thought, and the material world as
hypothetical, and withal our pretension of _property_ and even of
self-hood are fading with the rest, if, at last, even our thoughts
are not finalities; but the incessant flowing and ascension reach
these also, and each thought which yesterday was a finality, to-day
is yielding to a larger generalization?

        With such volatile elements to work in, 'tis no wonder if our
estimates are loose and floating.  We must work and affirm, but we
have no guess of the value of what we say or do.  The cloud is now as
big as your hand, and now it covers a county.  That story of Thor,
who was set to drain the drinking-horn in Asgard, and to wrestle with
the old woman, and to run with the runner Lok, and presently found
that he had been drinking up the sea, and wrestling with Time, and
racing with Thought, describes us who are contending, amid these
seeming trifles, with the supreme energies of Nature.  We fancy we
have fallen into bad company and squalid condition, low debts,
shoe-bills, broken glass to pay for, pots to buy, butcher's meat,
sugar, milk, and coal.  `Set me some great task, ye gods! and I will
show my spirit.' `Not so,' says the good Heaven; `plod and plough,
vamp your old coats and hats, weave a shoestring; great affairs and
the best wine by and by.' Well, 'tis all phantasm; and if we weave a
yard of tape in all humility, and as well as we can, long hereafter
we shall see it was no cotton tape at all, but some galaxy which we
braided, and that the threads were Time and Nature.

        We cannot write the order of the variable winds.  How can we
penetrate the law of our shifting moods and susceptibility?  Yet they
differ as all and nothing.  Instead of the firmament of yesterday,
which our eyes require, it is to-day an eggshell which coops us in;
we cannot even see what or where our stars of destiny are.  From day
to day, the capital facts of human life are hidden from our eyes.
Suddenly the mist rolls up, and reveals them, and we think how much
good time is gone, that might have been saved, had any hint of these
things been shown.  A sudden rise in the road shows us the system of
mountains, and all the summits, which have been just as near us all
the year, but quite out of mind.  But these alternations are not
without their order, and we are parties to our various fortune.  If
life seem a succession of dreams, yet poetic justice is done in
dreams also.  The visions of good men are good; it is the
undisciplined will that is whipped with bad thoughts and bad
fortunes.  When we break the laws, we lose our hold on the central
reality.  Like sick men in hospitals, we change only from bed to bed,
from one folly to another; and it cannot signify much what becomes of
such castaways, -- wailing, stupid, comatose creatures, -- lifted
from bed to bed, from the nothing of life to the nothing of death.

        In this kingdom of illusions we grope eagerly for stays and
foundations.  There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at
home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there.
Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with
ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth.
I look upon the simple and childish virtues of veracity and honesty
as the root of all that is sublime in character.  Speak as you think,
be what you are, pay your debts of all kinds.  I prefer to be owned
as sound and solvent, and my word as good as my bond, and to be what
cannot be skipped, or dissipated, or undermined, to all the _eclat_
in the universe.  This reality is the foundation of friendship,
religion, poetry, and art.  At the top or at the bottom of all
illusions, I set the cheat which still leads us to work and live for
appearances, in spite of our conviction, in all sane hours, that it
is what we really are that avails with friends, with strangers, and
with fate or fortune.

        One would think from the talk of men, that riches and poverty
were a great matter; and our civilization mainly respects it.  But
the Indians say, that they do not think the white man with his brow
of care, always toiling, afraid of heat and cold, and keeping within
doors, has any advantage of them.  The permanent interest of every
man is, never to be in a false position, but to have the weight of
Nature to back him in all that he does.  Riches and poverty are a
thick or thin costume; and our life -- the life of all of us --
identical.  For we transcend the circumstance continually, and taste
the real quality of existence; as in our employments, which only
differ in the manipulations, but express the same laws; or in our
thoughts, which wear no silks, and taste no ice-creams.  We see God
face to face every hour, and know the savor of Nature.

        The early Greek philosophers Heraclitus and Xenophanes measured
their force on this problem of identity.  Diogenes of Apollonia said,
that unless the atoms were made of one stuff, they could never blend
and act with one another.  But the Hindoos, in their sacred writings,
express the liveliest feeling, both of the essential identity, and of
that illusion which they conceive variety to be.  "The notions, `_I
am_,' and `_This is mine_,' which influence mankind, are but
delusions of the mother of the world.  Dispel, O Lord of all
creatures! the conceit of knowledge which proceeds from ignorance."
And the beatitude of man they hold to lie in being freed from
fascination.

        The intellect is stimulated by the statement of truth in a
trope, and the will by clothing the laws of life in illusions.  But
the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise.
There need never be any confusion in these.  In a crowded life of
many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest
hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same
choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes
his fortune in absolute Nature.  It would be hard to put more mental
and moral philosophy than the Persians have thrown into a sentence:
--

        "Fooled thou must be, though wisest of the wise:
        Then be the fool of virtue, not of vice."
 
        There is no chance, and no anarchy, in the universe.  All is
system and gradation.  Every god is there sitting in his sphere.  The
young mortal enters the hall of the firmament: there is he alone with
them alone, they pouring on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning
him up to their thrones.  On the instant, and incessantly, fall
snow-storms of illusions.  He fancies himself in a vast crowd which
sways this way and that, and whose movement and doings he must obey:
he fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant.  The mad crowd
drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be
done, now that.  What is he that he should resist their will, and
think or act for himself?  Every moment, new changes, and new showers
of deceptions, to baffle and distract him.  And when, by and by, for
an instant, the air clears, and the cloud lifts a little, there are
the gods still sitting around him on their thrones, -- they alone
with him alone.

                                       THE END
.